Students from our White Hats Research Club won the first edition of the HackNation hackathon organised by the Ministry of Digital Affairs. The competition gathered one and a half thousand participants from around Poland. Congratulations!

The event, organised in Bydgoszcz, was Poland’s largest implementation hackathon focused on innovation in public administration. For 24 hours, the participants analysed data, designed, programmed, and tested their ideas in order to address challenges prepared by ministries, state-owned companies, and public institutions. Our representatives excelled in the “AI-Based Decision Assistant” challenge submitted by the Ministry of Sport and Tourism.

After the teams finished their work, the jury evaluated all submitted solutions and selected the top three proposals for each of the 16 challenges. The developers presented their prototypes, explained their assumptions, work methods, and possible development paths. Of the three final solutions for each challenge, the jury selected one that, in their opinion, had the greatest potential for implementation in public administration.

One of the finalists of the “AI-Based Decision Assistant” competition was a team of our Faculty’s students consisting of: Michał Bernacki, Kajetan Kucharski, Mateusz Jakoniuk, and Wiktor Rojecki. They are all members of the White Hats Student Research Club.

The main goal of their challenge, submitted by the Ministry of Sport and Tourism, was to develop an AI assistant. Ultimately, it will support decision-makers in managing administrative cases.

In public administration, such advanced tools are used, among other things, to automatically summarize case files, send reminders of important deadlines and procedures, and generate draft responses and documents, facilitating the preparation of official letters and decisions.

– We developed two applications. The first one is the assistant’s engine itself, aggregating cases from existing public administration systems and using AI to generate response templates. The second, and by far the most important, is its interface – says Michał Bernacki.

– We decided not to develop an entire document-generating tool from scratch, but to write an extension for Microsoft Word, and this approach turned out to be a great move. The Word plug-in allows decision-makers to manage the entire case process from within a single application, starting from the document submission and finishing with the final decision – he adds.

The biggest challenge in the competition was, of course, the very limited time available to complete the task.

– We had only 24 hours, obviously not enough to prepare a complex application. From the very beginning of the code-writing process, we were very ambitious about the project. We wanted not only to meet the formal requirements of the task, but above all, to offer a user-friendly and easy-to-use product, even as a prototype – emphasizes Michał Bernacki.

For their project, our students received a prize of PLN 25,000 and the opportunity to continue working with the Ministry of Sport and Tourism on further development of the application.

The awards were presented by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski, as well as by representatives of the institutions that prepared the challenges for the participants. Among them were Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski, as well as Deputy Minister of Finance and Head of the National Revenue Administration Marcin Łoboda.