- Mark F
- Feb 19
- 2 min read
(Photo credit for top-left, top-right, and bottom-left photos - Adam Isfendiyar)
This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the AI Engine: UK University Hackathon—my very first hackathon—along with my friend (and former uni classmate) Adam. From the moment we arrived, we knew we were in for an exciting day. Back amongst the buzz of ambitious university students with all of the latest AI tools at their disposal! The venue was buzzing with creative energy, and it felt like everyone was there to explore new ideas, learn from each other, and have a great time building cool things.
Adam and I teamed up because we both share a passion for being at the frontier and love developing our skills. For this challenge, we decided to tackle the fashion industry. Specifically, our goal was to reimagine the customer experience—from online browsing to in-store interactions—using AI to solve a fashion problem that we have ourselves all of the time. What should you wear? What looks good?
Fashion often feels like it’s playing catch-up with technology, and we saw an opportunity to leverage cutting-edge tools to help customers find outfits, discover trends, and interact with brands in more meaningful ways.
Over the course of the hackathon, we brainstormed, designed, coded, and tested our concept non-stop. It was a rollercoaster of a ride but by the end we had a functional prototype. Our app uses AI-driven recommendations (OpenAI gpt-4o-mini model as proof-of-concept) to provide personalised outfit recommendations, SERP API to find out where to buy the recommendation, and an interactive interface with virtual try-on (FASHN.ai). The experience aims to bridge the gap between online convenience and in-store discovery.
We were thrilled (and a bit shocked) when our project took first place in the “Reinventing the Customer Experience” category—and even more so when we learned we were finalists overall (top 4) and had to pitch our work! It was an amazing feeling to see our project validated, especially as first-time hackathon participants. Beyond the recognition, the best part was seeing how other teams approached their challenges. The variety of projects—from healthcare tools to speech assistants—made it clear that these technologies have massive potential across countless industries.
A huge shout out and thank-you to Zoe Qin, Jamesin Seidel, Will Bennett, Justina Chung, Patrick Gilday, and the entire AI Engine: UK University Hackathon team for organizing such a fantastic event.
I now realize just how rewarding hackathons can be. It’s not just about winning—it’s about learning, collaborating, and pushing yourself to create something in a very short amount of time. We were actually quite nervous for the hackathon (not knowing what to expect!) but it's really remarkable how much you can do in a day! Adam and I are already looking forward to entering our next hackathon and with so much opportunity on the horizon, it feels like the perfect time to explore how AI and automation can solve real problems and reshape entire industries.
If you’re interested in checking out our code or learning more about the project, you can find it here on GitHub:
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates on what we build next!