EVL Hosts the Sage Grande Summer of AI Hackathon

Created on July 20, 2026

2026   ·   event   ·   events

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago hosted the Sage Grande: Summer of AI hackathon, a nine-day hands-on camp held July 20–28, 2026, where graduate students, postdocs, and early-career researchers built and deployed AI at the edge on live Sage nodes.

Participants worked directly with Sage Grande Testbed hardware — nodes equipped with cameras, microphones, lidar, and other environmental sensors — running their own machine learning models on the devices themselves rather than shipping raw data to the cloud. Over the course of the camp, teams moved from an introduction to the testbed and its cyberinfrastructure through model development, on-node deployment, and validation against live sensor streams. EVL’s Cyber-Commons display wall was used throughout to share code, dashboards, sensor imagery, and results side by side during working sessions.

Each team closed the camp by delivering a set of artifacts: a five-minute presentation on July 27 and 28, a project overview for the Sage website, an edge computing application where applicable, a poster, and a review of the experience of building for the edge.

The Sage Grande Testbed is an NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure for AI@Edge computing, harnessing AI to address important science questions. For more information, visit https://sagecontinuum.org/.

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  • Caption: Sage Grande Testbed overview session in EVL’s Cyber-Commons, opening the Summer of AI hackathon.

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  • Caption: Hackathon participants working alongside Sage nodes and their sensors during the camp.

Link: https://sagecontinuum.org/docs/events/2026-Sage-Summer-Hackathon

#AI #EdgeComputing #SageContinuum #UIC #EVL