Five Queen’s Computing students spent Fall reading week in Chengdu, China, competing in a global hackathon.
The only full-undergraduate team at the event, Chloe Houvardas, ArtSci ’28, John Li, Wafeeqa Chowdhury, Rory Macdonald, and Michelle Shi, all ArtSci ’27, took home first place at the Chengdu 80 Global FinTech Product Design and Development Competition at the Southwestern University of Finance Economics (SWUFE).
The team was mentored by Coach and Undergraduate Chair of Computing Yuanzhu Chen and Professor Emirita Wendy Powley, who retired last year after serving the Queen’s community for over 45 years.
This year’s theme was “Building the Next-Generation AI-Native Financial Application Platform.” Instead of delivering a single product, teams were tasked with building an entire platform capable of generating financial apps using natural language prompts and then using it to create three different apps.
Per the title, each team was given 80 non-stop hours to build the project and three apps.
Eight different universities from Canada, China, the U.S., and Europe participated in the invite-only, all-expenses paid competition, including Tsinghua University, the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, ETH Zurich, and SWUFE.
Houvardas, a fourth-year Computing student, participated in the competition two years prior, where Queen’s also won first place. This year, she returned as team captain, leading the team to victory.
Despite previously participating in the competition, she still felt like she was in “unfamiliar territory” given how much had changed in the past two years, she told The Journal.
During the event, the Queen’s team spent more time ideating than others, ensuring their project targeted a specific problem aimed at a particular target demographic.
The team built a product focused on small and medium businesses to create their own agentically-powered financial apps, demonstrating it with an app that sends invoices, an app that pays them, and one that predicts cash flow.
Agentic AI could be considered “reckless” in the financial space and capable of making costly mistakes, so the team added guardrails and an audit agent framework to ensure every action taken by the agent was “safe and compliant,” she said.
The format of the hackathon was very different to what Houvardas, a seasoned hackathon winner, was expecting.
“Normally you have a time limit, you start hacking, and you’re able to distribute this time however you want,” she said.
This time, teams had to submit different parts of the project every 12 hours, which they could no longer modify. This also meant they couldn’t pivot to a different idea.
“Normally with hackathons, I’m used to pivoting a lot,” Houvardas said.
After the 80 hours were complete, they took a scheduled tour of Chengdu, visiting the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding and the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, a World Heritage Site.
Each member documented their experience on RedNote, a major Chinese social media platform, which sponsored the competition.
They posted in between breaks from coding and trying local food and culture, winning two additional awards for Most Popular Team and Most Popular Individual, won by MacDonald, based on the number of likes received.
After that came a full-day of presentations, which was far longer and more in-depth than a typical hackathon, Houvardas said.
Teams delivered a technical defense in the morning and an investment pitch in the afternoon, with in-depth question periods.
“The judges, all very accomplished industry experts from big financial firms in China, either had really strong finance backgrounds or led the innovation and tech fronts of these particular firms, would grill you on your architecture in front of everybody,” she said.
Hackers had real-time, in-ear translators since some of the judges were strongest in Chinese, which was a very cool experience, Houvardas said.
There was also a code-quality score generated by engineers that thoroughly went over the codebase, staying up past 4 a.m., verifying its function, and judging whether it was production ready.
The day after the presentation was over, they got to explore the city on their own with the other teams, even running into some Queen’s alumni on the streets of Chengdu.
“We ended up getting really close with some of the other teams. Went out on the town and then had our final hot pot dinner and then it was back to Canada. It went by very quickly,” she said.
Powley, who also mentored the team two years ago, was blown away by the team’s success and how the event was organized.
“To have won the competition with a team of five undergraduate students was amazing,” she said.
Tags
China, hackathon, School of Computing
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