Yale Build with AI Hackathon x Google Cloud Labs - Day I

Important: Waitlist Registration Only
All applicants are initially placed on a waitlist. Our team will review applications and send email confirmations with tickets to approved participants.
Attendance Requirement: You must commit to participating in both days to be eligible for approval.

Note on Day 1: Day 1 is hybrid, allowing for flexible travel to Yale SOM for Saturday’s in-person hackathon from NYC, Boston and beyond, who are welcome to join virtually on Day 1.
If you are local to Yale/New Haven, you are expected to join us at Yale SOM in-person on both days.
Day 1 - April 10 - Hackathon Kick Off
🎤 Keynote & Labs Evening Session

Get ready to build! This evening session is designed to provide the technical foundation and inspiration needed for a successful hackathon. Attendees will receive direct guidance on Google Cloud tools and Gemini APIs.

Agenda:

7:00 PM – 7:15 PM: 👋 Check-in & Refreshments Networking music, high energy.

7:15 PM – 7:45 PM: 🎤 Keynote: The Multimodal Frontier Intro to Gemini Live API & Agent Development Kit. The "Anti-Project" Brief: Explicitly show the slide of what NOT to build (No basic RAG, No Medical/Mental Health bots). Introduction of Judges and Mentors.

7:45 PM – 8:00 PM: 🛠️ Environment Setup & API Access Distribution of Google Cloud Credits. Verification of API access (ensure every laptop is ready for Saturday morning).

8:00 PM – 8:45 PM: 💻 Introduction to Gemini Live Agents and Gemini CLI Technical deep-dive: "From 0 to Hello World" with Live API. Technical deep-dive: How to master Gemini CLI for your coding projects.

8:45 PM – 9:00 PM: 🤝 Speed Networking & Team Formation The Rule: Teams of 3–4 preferred. Activity: "Pitch your skill" (e.g., "I'm a backend dev looking for a creative storyteller"). Solo hackers are grouped or encouraged to join existing ideas to maximize credit usage and project quality.

Workshop Guidelines:

Level 0 Instructions

Level 1 Instructions

Level 3 Instructions

Level 4 Instructions

The Mission:
Step out of the traditional "text box" paradigm and build AI that truly connects. This hackathon challenges you to create immersive, multimodal AI agents using Google Cloud and Gemini.

Participants will leverage the speed of the Gemini Live API and the power of Google’s GenAI SDK/ Agent Development Kit  to build solutions in one of two categories:

The Live Agent: Build real-time, voice-and-vision enabled agents that can converse naturally and handle interruptions (e.g., real-time translators, vision-enabled tutors).

The Creative Storyteller: Build agents that generate rich, interleaved outputs—seamlessly mixing text, audio, and visuals into a cohesive narrative flow.

Don’t just build a chatbot. Build an experience that sees, hears, speaks, and creates.
Prizes:

Up to 4 tickets to Google I/O on May 19-20 in Mountain View, CA.

The winning team will receive an exclusive, private pitch session with the Deal Team of Google’s AI Futures Fund.

$800 at the Google Store in NYC

Important: Waitlist Registration Only All applicants are initially placed on a waitlist. Our team will review applications and send email confirmations with tickets to approved participants.
Attendance Requirement: You must commit to participating in both days to be eligible for approval.

Note on Day 1: Day 1 is hybrid, allowing for flexible travel to Yale SOM for Saturday’s in-person session from NYC, Boston, and beyond.

Register for Day 2: Yale Build with AI Hackathon - Day II
Join the Slack

This is a hybrid event. Join the event virtually at https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-nyc-presents-yale-build-with-ai-hackathon-x-google-cloud-labs-day-i/
or in person at

Yale School of Management, Evans Hall - 165 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511

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Agenda

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Speakers

Christina Lin - Google (Developer Relations Engineering Manager - Americas)

Christina Lin is a Developer Relations Engineering Manager at Google, leading advocacy and community programs across the Americas. With over two decades of experience spanning Google, Redpanda Data, and Red Hat, Christina has built a career at the intersection of developer relations, open source, and enterprise architecture. Recognized for driving technical ed…

Kartik Derasari

Roya Kandalan - Google Developer Expert (Generative AI Research Scientist)

Roya is a research scientist working on advancing artificial intelligence technologies. She has a PhD in Electrical Engineering, is a US patent holder, and has multiple publications in primary journals on electrical engineering, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Her primary research interests are generative AI, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Roya has developed machine learni…

Judges

Annie Beckman - New York Law School

Nikoloz Kveitaia - Tools for Humanity (Field Operations Manager)

Building Community at World (world.org) Investor and part-time team member at two different startups Proud Georgian-American 🇬🇪🇺🇸

Cindy Morand - Stealth Startup | Columbia Business School (Founder & CEO | MBA Candidate)

Cindy Morand is a founder on a mission to help Millennials and Gen Z use smart financing and leverage. She is an expert in money engineering and interest rates with 14 years of experience. Formerly, she was a VP & sovereign banker at Citi, where she advised Ministers of Finance and helped countries optimize over $100B in debt, saving hundreds of millions in annual interest costs, including…

Akriti Agarwal

I build consumer and platform products at scale—bringing clarity, speed, and responsible AI to teams shipping to millions. Ex‑Google, Amazon, PayPal; I lead SDKs, ML personalization, and growth programs with measurable outcomes. Recent highlights: Google: Took the Meet Add‑ons SDK from alpha to global GA across Web/Android/iOS on a 100M+ DAU surface; launched with productivity, entertainment, …

Shravan Chandrasekaran - Marsh (Global Product Lead - Benchmarking)

Mission-driven customer-focused product leader with a technical background, driving global adoption of a market-leading enterprise SaaS platform. Proven success in orchestrating product development and adoption leading to protecting product incumbency and penetrating new markets. Experience leading globally distributed and cross-functional teams.

Elizabeth Mezias - Outside, Inc. (Android Engineer)

Elizabeth Mezias has been full-time on Android since 2008. She leads the Boston Android Meetup organizer team and runs an Informal Android Developer Meetup every two weeks online (in Boston) to network and keep up with the latest mobile technology, both using it and creating it.

Jay Jay Q - Microsoft AI (Member of Technical Staff)

Sarena Wu - Meta (AI Researcher)

Anita Sharif-Hyder - Yale School of Management (Associate Dean)

Tauhid Zaman - Yale School of Management (Professor)

Jack Zhang - Mckinsey & Company (Consultant & SOM Alumni)

Xiuye (Sue) Chen Chen - Yale University (CS Professor)

Shane Frederick - Yale School of Management (Professor)

Fan Zhang - Yale University (CS Professor)

Alyssa Lee - DataHub (Chief of Staff)

Charles Barnett - Yale University (Director, Continuous Improvement and Transformation)

Alex Amari - Yale University (Teaching and Research Fellow)

Chong Lam Cheong - Google DeepMind (AI Safety Product Manager)

Anand Ranganathan - Yale School of Management & Bridgewater Associates (Engineering Manager & Lecturer at SOM)

Ankil Patel - Stealth Startup (Serial Entrepreneur)

Ankil Patel is a serial entrepreneur whose startups have been acquired, with pending patents in antifragile systems, neurotech, and biotech. His work spans the full stack - from GPU kernel optimization and low-level systems to applied AI and large-scale distributed infrastructure. He has conducted reinforcement learning research and won competitions in game theory and programming. He writes ab…

Kartik Derasari

Hosted By

Anna Nerezova, GDG Organizer

Anna Nerezova is a Digital Marketing and Cloud Transformation Consultant with 15 years of experience in data, analytics and optimization.
She has built innovative solutions using Google Cloud to solve problems in the media and entertainment, tech, health and non-profit industries
Anna is a Google Cloud Engineer Scholar, and is on the 100 Women in Analytics list by Google Analytics. She is also a Google Developer Group NYC lead and a mentor for the Northeast, and a proud Women Techmakers Ambassador.

Anna is passionate about using the latest AI/ML technologies to provide solutions and bring growth and better experience for all users. She is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, and is committed to helping underrepresented groups become entrepreneurs and financially independent.

Bhavik Chopra, Computer Science Graduate Student

Hi, I’m Bhavik — a Data Scientist at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and an Organizer for Google Developer Group (GDG) NYC, where I foster a thriving tech community through events like GDG NYC DevFest and Cloud Study Jams on Google Cloud and Terraform.

My passion for technology started in childhood, surrounded by computers, software, and games. Although I initially pursued Science-Maths in high school, my true calling emerged when I discovered software development. Since then, I’ve been building projects and exploring cutting-edge technologies.

I hold a Master’s in Computer Science from Pace University and a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Silver Oak University, where I actively contributed to the tech community through DSC Silver Oak (Google Developers) and various IEEE leadership roles.

Today, I merge my technical expertise with my love for community building—whether through data science innovations at MTA, improving NYC transit for 6M+ daily riders, or empowering developers through GDG NYC events.

Let’s connect and create something impactful together! 🚀

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Partner

AI Futures Fund (https://dub.sh/AI-Futures-Fund)
Working with startups to build what’s next in AI

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Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-nyc-presents-yale-build-with-ai-hackathon-x-google-cloud-labs-day-i/.