team of UCL AI Festival hackathon I simulated the entire event using autonomous AI agentreenacting participant networking, team building, mentoring, and project development within a virtual pixel art office.
Tomáš Hrdlička, research engineer at MockAI and graduate of the UCL Computer Graphics, Vision and Imaging MSc, shared details of the build on LinkedIn after the weekend event. The team collected the LinkedIn and GitHub profiles of participants and mentors and generated more than 100 personalized AI agents to “automatically run the hackathon.”
The project won the Anthropic award for best use of the Claude Agent SDK at the AIEngine-sponsored hackathon, part of the inaugural UCL AI Festival.
Simulation of collaboration with AI agents
According to Hrdlička, agents are designed to network, identify complementary skills, form teams, and autonomously build functional projects. The mentor simulated giving feedback while walking the floor. “We simulated the entire hackathon using an AI agent,” Hrdlička wrote on LinkedIn.
“At this weekend’s UCL AI Festival Hackathon (AIEngine), we scraped the LinkedIn and GitHub of all participants and mentors. We then generated over 100 of them as autonomous AI agents with personalized avatars in our pixel art office.
And let the hackathon itself play. ”
“Agents networked, found complementary skills, assembled teams, and built functional projects, all on their own. Mentors walked the floor and gave feedback.”
The team built the system in 24 hours and won the Humanity Award for best use of the Claude Agent SDK.
AIEngine and build-focused agenda
The hackathon was part of the first two days of the UCL AI Festival, hosted by UCL Innovation & Enterprise in partnership with NVIDIA and HPE. The event combines a two-day build-focused hackathon with research-driven sessions across healthcare, climate, robotics, and large-scale language models.
More than 150 participants participated in this hackathon segment, hosted by AIEngine and supported by industry partners such as AWS and Anthropic. The winner will receive tickets and travel funds to NVIDIA’s GTC AI conference in San Jose.
Hrdlička said the demo resonated with participants, especially the ability to search for yourself and see a personalized avatar that “actually looks like you and talks about things you would do.”
Agent ecosystem moves into education space
This simulation raises questions about how multi-agent systems can be used outside of demonstration environments. Hackathons traditionally focus on human collaboration under time pressure, but this build suggests that similar dynamics can be modeled and repeated in computers.
UCL positions the AI Festival as a platform that connects research and entrepreneurship. Professor Geraint Rees, Associate Professor of Research, Innovation and Global Engagement at UCL, said: “The UCL AI Festival highlights the tremendous power and potential of AI to revolutionize so many areas of business and research. From developers creating innovative tools to solve persistent problems to researchers using it to answer unanswered questions, AI is only going to become more important. “We are a global leader in innovation, highlighted by our strong partnerships with NVIDIA and HPE.”
“AI is accelerating the pace and scale of research and innovation, opening up unprecedented opportunities in areas such as healthcare, climate science and robotics,” said HPE’s Utz-Uwe Haus. UCL “AI Festival embodies this momentum by bringing together a diverse range of experts and entrepreneurs to showcase how they are leveraging the latest AI technologies. At the same time, it provides a forum for public debate to explore the scale and capabilities of AI supercomputers and the strategic responsibilities that come with artificial intelligence.” Sovereignty and control. ”
The four-day festival took place in central London from February 28 to March 3, bringing together researchers, founders and infrastructure partners from across the UK’s AI ecosystem.
