A team of graduate students from our School of MAM’s Computational Engineering and Design (CEaD) Lab won first place in the Autodesk challenge at the ASME IDETC/CIE 2025 Student Hackathon, held August 10–17 in Anaheim, California.
Ph.D. students Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah and Hoang Anh Nguyen, advised by Dr. Hongyi Xu, earned the top spot and a $1,400 prize for their innovative solution.
This year’s hackathon drew more than 55 participants from 33 universities across six countries, challenging students to solve real-world problems in design, manufacturing, and simulation.
The UConn team tackled Autodesk’s DesignQA challenge, which tested how well AI systems could read and reason over complex engineering documents. They built a large language model–based framework that improved rule extraction, reduced model hallucinations, and achieved one of the highest scores on the benchmark, securing their first-place win.