The Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) is pleased to share that two DSAI students, Michael Arya WIJAYA and Joseph BERACHAH, together with their teammates Nikolas Jonathan WIJAYA from the Department of Applied Mathematics (AMA) and Michael LEE, a graduate of The University of Hong Kong, won 1st Place in the Startup Track at the SEA Hacks AI Hackathon, held on 4–5 July 2026.
SEA Hacks is a two-day AI hackathon that brought together over 300 builders, including students, founders, and professionals, to develop real AI products addressing practical challenges across areas such as family businesses, finance, healthcare, and frontier startups. The event was organised in partnership with freeCodeCamp, Inception Studio — Stanford’s AI founder incubator — and the Y.Elites Association. Participants competed across three tracks: Startup, Industry, and Community.
In the Startup Track, which focused on venture-scaled startup ideas and fast-moving product development, the team’s project, Weft, was selected as the winning project among 25 submitted projects. Weft is an open-source, privacy-first desktop application designed to help users better manage personal relationships across messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The application organises conversation history into useful relationship context, including important memories and follow-ups, and generates context-aware reply suggestions.
A key feature of Weft is its strong emphasis on privacy and user control. Conversations and generated information are stored locally on the user’s device, allowing users to benefit from AI-powered assistance while maintaining ownership of their personal data.
The team developed the project within just 48 hours, turning their idea into a functional product through close collaboration and rapid prototyping. This achievement demonstrates the students’ creativity, technical capability, and entrepreneurial mindset in applying AI to real-world problems.
DSAI warmly congratulates the team on this outstanding achievement.
