Are you an industry professional or academic who'd like to participate as a judge? We'd love to hear from you.
Judges must deeply understand Edge AI — what it means to build AI systems that run locally without cloud inference. They assess whether a project genuinely operates on-device or simply wraps a cloud API.
We select judges with hands-on AI engineering experience — model fine-tuning, inference optimization, agent architectures, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering. They evaluate technical sophistication, not just surface presentation.
At least one judge per panel has direct familiarity with HP ZGX Nano™, HP Developer Tools (ZTK, Z Runtime CLI), and HP's AI ecosystem — ensuring the HP Product Integration criteria (25 pts) is scored by someone who knows the platform deeply.
Judges are vetted for experience with locally-served LLMs — Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, LM Studio, and open-weight models (Llama, Mistral, Phi, Gemma). They assess quantization choices, model selection trade-offs, and compute efficiency on the ZGX Nano.
Each challenge track maps to a real-world domain — security, productivity, healthcare, creative tech, or AI ethics. Judges are selected to ensure at least one domain expert per track can assess the real-world viability, impact, and market readiness of the solution.
Beyond scoring, judges are expected to provide constructive, actionable feedback to every team. We prioritize clear communicators and genuine mentors who are invested in the growth of student builders — not just evaluators.
A balance of industry practitioners and academic researchers ensures both applied and theoretical dimensions are covered. SJSU faculty and research-adjacent professionals bring academic rigor to the evaluation.
All judges declare conflicts before the event. Teams with a direct relationship to a judge are reassigned to a different judging room. Our two-round format with separate judge pools is specifically designed to eliminate bias.
Our distinguished panel of judges brings decades of experience from Silicon Valley, academia, and the AI industry. They will evaluate your projects across all tracks.
On September 26th students and judges will meet at ISB on the 8th floor where all teams will pitch. As there are two rounds of judging, there will be two groups of judges to mitigate judging bias. All teams and the first round of judges will be split into one of three rooms. Judges in each room will select the top two teams for their room to advance to the final pitch on stage. After finalists are selected, participants and judges will move from ISB to the SJSU Student Union Ballroom (2nd Floor) for lunch, networking, the final pitch from the top six teams, and round two judging. After finalist pitches, judges deliberate and score each project using our standardized rubric. The Awards Ceremony begins at 2:40 PM.