Senior computer science and mathematics major Anton Angeletti and his team won two major awards at TreeHacks, the largest collegiate hackathon in the United States, hosted annually at Stanford University.
At hackathons, competitors engage in rapid, collaborative engineering to "hack" together a product in a short timespan, and then present their product to judges.
The Husker undergrad earned first place in Zoom’s Education Track, one of the eight primary tracks available for competition, as well as Best Use of HeyGen’s Avatar API. The team received a $1,000 prize as well as AirPods Pro, Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and internship interviews.
Overall, TreeHacks was attended by over 1000 competitors on 378 teams, in addition to representatives from prominent Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. TreeHacks attracts top talent from around the world — accepting just 7 percent of their over 15,000 applicants, and reimbursing travel to Stanford for every competitor. With keynote speakers like Sam Altman, the CEO and cofounder of OpenAI, and over $500,000 in prizes at stake, the scale of the event is unrivaled among collegiate hackathons.
During the 36-hour competition, Angeletti's team developed an app called Minerva, a multimodal AI-powered educator that creates live, interactive visualizations to teach concepts in real time during Zoom calls. Leveraging HeyGen’s live avatar technology, Minerva delivers a structured, one-on-one learning experience designed to make complex material more accessible and engaging for students in virtual environments.
“This was truly one of the craziest weekends of my life,” Angeletti said. “TreeHacks felt like a dream and I was so lucky to even be able to compete!”