Drexel’s School of Computer and Information Sciences (SCIS) welcomed 375 participants and sponsors to the 13th annual Philly Codefest on April 11-12, 2026. The software hackathon received 78 team project submissions from students and professionals from all backgrounds.
This year’s theme, “Building AI for Philly’s Future,” focused exclusively on developing novel software solutions that address real challenges facing Philadelphia communities. Participants created AI-powered apps and tools that demonstrate how responsible AI can strengthen neighborhoods and expand opportunities for all.
Students working in teams to build their projects
Competing for more than $12,250 in prizes from SCIS and event sponsors, participants worked in teams at the SCIS space at 3675 Market Street on April 11 and presented their projects to judges at the University City Science Center’s Quorum on April 12.
Teams presenting their projects to a panel of judges
The project teams comprised:
- 244 Drexel students;
- 75 participants from 16 other colleges and universities, including Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Bucks County Community College, Community College of Philadelphia, Penn State, Delaware Technical Community College, Temple, Haverford, UPenn, Lehigh, New Jersey Institute of Technology, NYU, Saint Joseph’s, East Stroudsburg, University of Maryland College Park and Villanova;
- 14 professionals.
Sponsors of Philly Codefest 2026 were Apollo, AppliedAI Studio, Auntie Anne’s, Comcast, CSL, Medtrics, Penn Mutual, WAWA and Wexford.
Drexel student organizations Drexel AI, Drexel Gaming Association (DGA), Hack4Impact, The Foundry and Women in Computing Society (WiCS) provided additional support and expertise throughout the two-day event.
View photos from the event on Drexel SCIS’s Facebook page
A panel of judges — comprised of Drexel faculty and staff, event sponsors and Philadelphia tech community leaders — selected the following projects as winners of Philly Codefest 2026:
Philly Codefest – Advanced Track Winners
First Place
PhilAIsion
Members: Eric Reise, Gilugali Mugisha Juste, Will Zhang, Eden Nesvisky
What it is: PhiliAIson is a voice AI civic assistant that helps Philadelphia residents navigate 700+ city services, file 311 reports, find legal help and fill out government forms in 10 languages. Call it, text it, or walk up to a kiosk and use it without a phone.
Second Place
The Holmes Project
Members: Max Lovinger, Aidan Rodriguez, Alfred Knopt, Aaron Park
What it is: Philadelphia has thousands of vacant, blighted properties and entire neighborhoods without reliable internet access. Both crises remain invisible to the people who could fix them because, while the data exists, no one has made it actionable. Holmes changes that. It is a real-time civic intelligence platform with two lenses: a housing map that scores every vacant property for blight risk and shows exactly where to intervene, and a connectivity map that reveals the neighborhoods where broadband gaps are leaving residents behind. Point it at any neighborhood, and Holmes—powered by live city data and AI—shows you what is broken, why it matters and what to do next.
Third Place
Mayday
Members: Muhammad Rohan Khan, Mubashir Moosa Panjwani, Muhammad Raheel, Hamza Sarfraz
What it is: Mayday is an AI-powered, offline-first emergency mesh network that helps Philadelphia respond to danger faster by turning nearby phones into a decentralized safety system.
Philly Codefest – Beginner Track Winners
First Place
215 Wrapped
Members: Rachel Phan, Sarah Peng, Allyssa Panganiban
What it is: 215 Wrapped is an AI-powered app that passively tracks your transportation, transforms it into personalized insights and behavioral personas, and uses gamification through challenges and leaderboards to drive engagement and community impact.
Second Place
ScholarLink Philly
Members: Augustus Sroka, Shay Taschereau, Trevor Wiggins
What it is: ScholarLink Philly is an agent-driven platform that automatically matches low-income Philadelphia students with scholarships they qualify for—before they even know to apply—by combining real-time web data, socioeconomic signal and AI-powered eligibility analysis.
Third Place
AllyAve
Members: Zachary Wang, Lila Zelnick, Nour Ghorbal
What it is: AllyAve is a community-run platform designed to support Philadelphians with disabilities. We provide a space where users can rate businesses in the Philadelphia area, with a particular focus on accessibility accommodations. Our platform features a wide range of local businesses, allowing users to view accessibility ratings and contribute their own feedback. As part of our AI initiative, we use convolutional neural networks to analyze images of establishments and identify whether a business offers accessibility accommodations. These findings can then be confirmed by users on the business’s page, adding an additional layer of verification to the AI’s analysis.
Culture and Community Award
SafeRoutePHL
Members: Sakina Ismail, Fakhar Hayat, Zaafir ul Hasan, Toshan Gosain
What it is: This app gives Philadelphians an alternative to Google Maps by offering three route options based on safety, travel time and an additional alternative. Route safety is calculated using kernel density estimation on crime data from Philly Crime Data, published by the Philadelphia Police Department. Each route coordinate is compared against a generated heatmap and scored on a normalized 0–10 scale, where 10 is the safest and 0 is the least safe. The app also provides a breakdown of crimes along each route, and an AI-generated summary explaining why the routes were recommended.
CSL Challenge
Making Healthcare Fit into Real Life Using Real-World Data
Donor Pulse
Members: Mokshad Ketan Sankhe, Jayesh Bane, Ishant Somal, Sarjit Kaswala, Devdeepsinh Zala, Het Patel
What it is: Donor Pulse connects hospitals and donors in real time. Our software intelligently matches hospitals with donors while managing the donor machines used to collect blood and plasma samples, monitoring hospital and collection center capacity, and scheduling donor appointments efficiently. We have also added an urgency feature that allows hospitals to prioritize urgent appointments in critical cases, such as ER needs. The system optimizes matches based on blood type compatibility, distance, reliability score, and transport availability. Hospitals with blood banks can store excess supply. An admin dashboard oversees donors, hospitals, analytics and audits.
AppliedAI Challenges
Challenge: Trust Accelerator Campaign
PoliSwipe
Members: Valeriy Cherniavskyy, Kamola Abdullaeva, Lochinbek Abdullaev, Mashhura Karimova, Mathew Kariuki
What it is: Politics are exciting, but also confusing. We make it clear by empowering people and lobbying politicians through an AI-powered data collector that simplifies political actions by using AppliedAI Studios’ Bozenian Logic Agent for logical stability.
Challenge: Inhibitor Innovation & Red Team Gauntlet
Prompt Siege
Members: William Feid, Daniel Davis, Andrew Brown, Aaron Joyce
What it is: Prompt Siege is a red-team testing harness for Inhibitor-enabled agents. It runs a repeatable suite of adversarial prompts covering prompt injection, privacy, unsafe advice and goal misalignment scenarios, then logs what was blocked, what slipped through and where defenses held strongest. Rather than relying on vague safety claims, it gives teams concrete evidence, reproducible attack cases, and clear recommendations for hardening agent behavior before deployment.
Challenge: Glass Box Audit Dashboard
GlassBox Explained
Members: Khushboo Patel, Rutvij Hiteshkumar Upadhyay, Neel Patel
What it is: GlassBox is the investigation dashboard for Inhibitor. It takes raw intervention logs, shows you exactly what your AI did wrong and what was corrected, finds patterns across incidents, answers questions through a built-in chatbot, and generates audit reports you can hand to a regulator.
Comcast Challenges
Challenge: Dead Zone Detective
The Holmes Project
Members: Max Lovinger, Aidan Rodriguez, Alfred Knopt, Aaron Park
What it is: Philadelphia has thousands of vacant, blighted properties and entire neighborhoods without reliable internet access. Both crises remain invisible to the people who could fix them because, while the data exists, no one has made it actionable. Holmes changes that. It is a real-time civic intelligence platform with two lenses: a housing map that scores every vacant property for blight risk and shows exactly where to intervene, and a connectivity map that reveals the neighborhoods where broadband gaps are leaving residents behind. Point it at any neighborhood, and Holmes—powered by live city data and AI—shows you what is broken, why it matters and what to do next.
Challenge: Dead Zone Detective
Mayday
Members: Muhammad Rohan Khan, Mubashir Moosa Panjwani, Muhammad Raheel, Hamza Sarfraz
What it is: Mayday is an AI-powered, offline-first emergency mesh network that helps Philadelphia respond to danger faster by turning nearby phones into a decentralized safety system.
Penn Mutual Challenge
Challenge: Best Use of AI to Simplify Life Insurance
ClaimPilot
Members: Zach Siapno, Ethan Siapno, Zachary Ngo
What it is: ClaimPilot is an AI-powered life insurance education tool that guides families through death claim intake and helps them understand the real differences between policy types.