Pitches submitted for the 2026 Hacks with Friends are displayed below.
- Pitch 1: Field Trip to Gas Town
- Pitch 2: Withdrawn
- Pitch 3: Modernizing the MTech Mentorship Lifecycle
- Pitch 4: Withdrawn
- Pitch 5: GrantLens – Researcher’s Command Center - 5th Place
- Pitch 6: Dynamic Org Charts - 4th Place
- Pitch 7: The Legacy Loop: AI Powered Knowledge Transfer System - 1st Place & People's Choice Award
- Pitch 8: Deploy Your Own Certbot!
- Pitch 9: Spirit of Excellence Assistant Form
- Pitch 10: Accessible Mail: GenAI‑Powered Email Accessibility - 2nd Place
- Pitch 11: TDX Context Learner (Weekly Ticket Insights → KBA Drafts → AI-Ready Context) - 3rd Place
Pitch 1: Field Trip to Gas Town
Team 1 Videos: 3-Minute Pitch
Team Members:
- Craig Landry - HITS - DEVOPs (Pitch Leader)
- Sean Meyer - HITS - MLOPS
- Pushyami Gundala - ITS Teaching & Learning
- Jaydon Krooss - ITS Teaching & Learning
- Martin Sager - ITS Systems
Category: BYOP - Bring your own project
Skills Needed: Developers - Full-Stack
Description: Let's give Gas Town (massive multi-agent AI) a solid shot. We'll choose a small application to build, and use Gas Town to "code" it. If you know what this is and haven't stopped reading, this might be for you!
- Pre Req 1: Know about Gas Town
- Pre Req 2: Tons of Claude Code credits. As advertised, "Gas Town is also expensive as hell."
Pitch 2: Withdrawn
Pitch 3: Modernizing the MTech Mentorship Lifecycle
Team 3 Video: 3-Minute Pitch
Team Members:
- Rose Moya (Pitch Leader)
- George Blichar
- Louis Daher
- Clay Eckman
- Irwin Estes
- Rafael Baran
- Mike Porter
- Thomas Stockwell
- Tong Sun
- Carman Thomas
Category: Simplify & Amplify
Skills Needed: Systems Analysts, Developers - TBD, Presenter / Promoter / Cheerleader, Documentation Specialists, Salesforce Developer, AI Engineer/Specialist, anyone interested in process improvement
Description: The Challenge: Our mentoring program works, but the "behind-the-scenes" logistics are messy. Because we rely on a mix of Salesforce, web forms, and scattered emails, it’s hard to see the full picture. This makes it difficult to know who is thriving and who needs extra support.
The Mission: We want to find a better way to keep our participants connected without the administrative headache. During this hack, we will explore:
- Smart Reminders & Automation: Could AI help handle routine check-ins or alert us if a pair hasn't met in a while?
- Connecting the Dots: How can we bring "hidden" email conversations into our central system so we can actually see the program's impact?
- Making it Easy: What tools would make logging a meeting feel like a quick text rather than a chore?
The Goal: To build a simple, smart blueprint that handles the process, so our mentors and mentees can focus on what matters: the relationship.
Pitch 4: Withdrawn
Pitch 5: GrantLens – Researcher’s Command Center
5th Place
Team 5 Videos: 3-Minute Pitch • 10-Minute Presentation to Judges
Team Members:
- Chris Rowland - ITS SysOps (Pitch Leader)
- Rob Carleski - UMSI
- Jeff Creech - HITS MCD
- Matthias Truttmann - Medical School
- Prithvi Dasgupta - ITS DSP
- Anthropic Claude - Anthropic AI
Category: Simplify & Amplify
Skills Needed: Business Analysts, Developers - Full-Stack, Developers - Front-End, Developers - Middle-Tier, Developers - Back-End, UI Designers, Project Managers, Presenter / Promoter / Cheerleader, Data Scientists, Experience with Research Grants and PI Workflows
Description: The Challenge: There is often a functional gap between institutional accounting (what has happened) and research planning (what needs to happen). Researchers need a way to bridge these two worlds to make informed, data-driven hiring and spending decisions.
The Solution: An interpretive dashboard that enhances existing grant data with predictive modeling, offering PIs a proactive view of their financial landscape.
Pitch 6: Dynamic Org Charts
4th Place
Team 6 Videos: 3-Minute Pitch • 10-Minute Presentation to Judges
Team Members:
- Kranthi Bandaru - ITS DSP Data Science Practice (Pitch Leader)
- Lance E Sloan - ITS Teaching and Learning
- Joseph Richardson - ITS Admin Marketing & Comms
- Derrick Tietz - ITS DSP Data Science Practice
- Bob Harold - ITS Comm Svcs Dir of Ops
Category: Simplify & Amplify
Skills Needed: Developers - Mobile, Developers - Full-Stack, Developers - Front-End, Developers - Middle-Tier, Developers - Back-End, UX Designers, UI Designers, Presenter / Promoter / Cheerleader, Documentation Specialists
Description: Have you ever wondered on knowing the Org Chart of a particular department or Unit IT? Have you ever tried to know the list of all members from a particular team or tried to find a supervisor of a particular person for sending kudos/testimonials? My hack idea might be the one you are interested in. I'm proposing an idea to list the org chart structure with the department head on the top, traversing down to individual staff members as a tree structure with Name, Title, and Picture (if available publicly). Would be useful for newbies at UM or people trying to get social with other teams.
Pitch 7: The Legacy Loop: AI Powered Knowledge Transfer System
1st Place & People's Choice Award
Team 7 Videos: 3-Minute Pitch • 10-Minute Presentation to Judges
Team Members: 
- Don DuChateau - Ross IT (Pitch Leader)
- Gail Lift - ITS / IAM
- Vinita Bolleddu - Marsal School of Education – IT
- Lucy Ye - College of Pharmacy – IT
- Ara Jo - Organizational Studies (LSA)
- Melissa Clive - HITS CRC
- Kali Yilmaz - Biomedical Research Core Facilities (BRCF)
- Sheetal Sonar - Ross IT
- Ali Abou-Zahr - Ross IT
Category: GenAI for Good: Harnessing Responsible AI
Skills Needed: Business Analysts, Developers - Full-Stack, Developers - TBD, UX Designers, UI Designers, Project Managers, Presenter / Promoter / Cheerleader, IT Security Specialist, Data Scientists
Description: When key staff members leave the university, critical "tribal knowledge" walks out the door with them. Standard offboarding documentation is often static or outdated, leaving new hires to spend months reinventing the wheel or digging through archived emails to understand past decisions.
The Legacy Loop solves this by creating a secure, interactive "knowledge capsule." Using a sandboxed Maizey instance, the system ingests a departing employee's selected project folders and ticket histories. It then conducts an AI-driven "exit interview," dynamically asking the employee to explain undocumented workarounds and decision logic found in their data.
The result is a custom "Legacy Bot" for the new hire. Instead of searching a shared drive for a PDF, they can simply ask, "How did Sarah handle this vendor error last time?" This project bridges the gap between static files and human experience, ensuring institutional wisdom is preserved and instantly accessible.
Pitch 8: Deploy Your Own Certbot!
Team 8 Video: 3-Minute Pitch
Team Members:
- Kyle Espinoza - ITS Systems Operations (Pitch Leader)
- Andrew Schwartz - ITS SS MiWorkSpace
- Eric Rasmussen - ITS System Operations
- Gaelen McIntee - Michigan Medicine: GSA - Administration
- Gregory Spilter - ITS EAS Application Ops
- Kristin Kovarik - ITS System Operations
- Sam Brow - Michigan Medicine: Space Planning and Analysis
- Vijay Danda - Michigan Medicine:MICHR - Operations
- Willy Wangsa - ITS Data Science Practice
Category: Simplify & Amplify
Skills Needed: Systems Analysts, Developers - Front-End, Developers - Back-End, UI Designers, Project Managers, Presenter / Promoter / Cheerleader, IT Security Specialist, Documentation Specialists, Service Center Specialists, Web hosting specialists, containerization specialists
Description: The global shortening of TLS/SSL certificate lifespans is a pressing issue that demands immediate attention. New standards set by the CA/B Forum will require all units to abandon manual certificate renewal methods in favor of automated solutions like ACME by March 15, 2027, to prevent service interruptions. Furthermore, Let’s Encrypt has announced plans to reduce certificate lifetimes from 90 to 45 days by 2028. These and other changes will dramatically increase the frequency of certificate renewals, severely compounding administrative burdens for service and website administrators.
Our hack aims to develop and demonstrate a robust, automated certificate management solution that U-M units, even those without much technical knowledge, can mimic in order to minimize manual effort and maintain uninterrupted service in the face of these critical changes.
Pitch 9: Spirit of Excellence Assistant Form
Team 8 Videos: 3-Minute Pitch
Team Members:
- Ben Andries - ITS Emerging Technology (Pitch Leader)
- Alan Robertson - Michigan Medicine Central Staffing Resource
Category: GenAI for Good: Harnessing Responsible AI
Skills Needed: Business Analysts, Developers - TBD, Presenter / Promoter / Cheerleader
Description: Recognizing coworkers is powerful, but writing meaningful kudos can be oddly hard when you’re busy or unsure what to say. This project prototypes an optional AI-assisted version of the ITS Spirit of Excellence form. It asks a few quick questions (what happened, impact, values demonstrated, tone) and generates a draft message the user can edit and refine through follow-up—nothing submits automatically. Users can always choose the classic non-AI form instead.
The tool can optionally look up the recipient’s manager and pre-fill that field. To support responsible GenAI use, it flags uncertainty, encourages concrete examples to reduce hallucinations, and displays estimated energy usage per generation. As an added option, the final approved message can be posted to a kudos Slack channel (e.g., #social-kudos).
Pitch 10: Accessible Mail: GenAI Powered Email Accessibility
2nd Place
Team 10 Videos: 3-Minute Pitch • 10-Minute Presentation to Judges
Team Members:
- Joel Howard - Flint ITS (Pitch Leader)
- Jennifer Daraiseh - Flint ITS
- Sam Kathiravan - UM-Ann Arbor: College of Engineering & Comp Sci Student
- Pallavi Koyye - UM-Ann Arbor: Applied Data Science Grad Student
- Madhu Latha Pulimi - UM-Ann Arbor: College of Engineering & Comp Sci Student
- Ian Ressa - Flint ITS
- Adam Robinson UM-Ann Arbor: ITS
- Krystal Tosch - Flint ITS
- Donald Wilcox - Flint ITS
Category: GenAI for Good: Harnessing Responsible AI
Skills Needed: Business Analysts, Developers - Full-Stack, Developers - Front-End, Developers - Back-End, UX Designers, UI Designers
Description: In April 2026, new federal digital accessibility rules require public institutions’ online content to meet WCAG Level AA standards, including email communications. Today, listserv tools like Mailman and other bulk email platforms send thousands of messages with missing alt text, poor color contrast, inaccessible layouts, and confusing links. Our project, Accessible Mail AI, is a middleware service that plugs into existing email list tools to analyze each message using AI (GPT Toolkit). It detects likely WCAG issues, then either (1) auto-generates a remediated version, or (2) presents suggested fixes to the sender or list owner for review and approval. The system logs issues and improvements over time so institutions can demonstrate progress toward the new federal mandate. This project shows how responsible GenAI can reduce barriers, support disability inclusion, and help our university meet upcoming legal requirements.
Pitch 11: TDX Context Learner (Weekly Ticket Insights → KBA Drafts → AI-Ready Context)
3rd Place
Team 11 Video: 3-Minute Pitch • 10-Minute Presentation to Judges
Team Members:
- Richard Sawoscinski - ITS Support Svcs & Emerg Tech (Pitch Leader)
- Gregory Allen - LSA Dean: TS Res,Comp & InfrSvcs
- Rick Getchell - ITS Support Svcs & Emerg Tech
- Chris Puzzuoli - CoE Elec Engr & Comp Sci
- Zhen Qian - ITS T&L Teaching and Learning
- Guo Ci Teo - Michigan Medicine: Ctr fr Translational Path
- Dan Stanish - LSA BI Team
Category: GenAI for Good: Harnessing Responsible AI
Skills Needed: Business Analysts, Systems Analysts, Documentation Specialists, we will be using Ai Workflows (powered by n8n) which is mostly low code. Anyone can join who wants to learn.
Description: Humans learn from patterns—AI doesn’t unless we continually turn operational experience into usable context. TDX Context Learner is an automated weekly workflow that pulls recently resolved TeamDynamix tickets, detects recurring issue “families,” and produces human-reviewed Knowledge Base Article (KBA) drafts plus an AI-ready “context pack”. The outcome is a lightweight, repeatable way to improve support quality, reduce repeat work, and steadily expand trusted knowledge that future AI assistants can reference.