Research Assistant Arnav Mehta participates in ‘Hack The North’

I have been working with the South Asian Studies Institute (SASI) since fall 2022, working on various technical tasks like maintaining the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (SACDA)’s automating repetitive tasks to save time, updating and maintaining the research websites, and creating new digital exhibits. Continuing my passion for computer science, I attended Canada’s largest hackathon, Hack the North, on September 18, 2025.

Getting into Hack the North was not guaranteed, it is one of the most competitive hackathons in North America, with thousands of applicants competing for just over 1,200 spots. Increase my chances of acceptance, I participated in their Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge, a separate competition where participants solve various technical puzzles and challenges. Completing the CTF considerably strengthened my application and helped demonstrate my technical skills to the organizers. I know many talented people who applied but did not get accepted, so I feel incredibly proud and grateful to have been selected. Just getting the opportunity to attend Hack the North was already a huge accomplishment in itself.

This three-day event was hosted at the University of Waterloo’s Engineering wing in Waterloo, Ontario, where people from all over the world came to compete and create a piece of software or hardware from scratch in just 36 hours.

Hack the North is known for its fun and exciting atmosphere, bringing together over 1,000 hackers from universities across North America and beyond. The event features workshops, tech talks from industry leaders, and mentorship opportunities with experienced developers and entrepreneurs. Participants have access to innovative technology provided by sponsor companies, enabling them to build innovative solutions across various domains including artificial intelligence, healthcare, sustainability, and social impact.

My project for this hackathon originated from my work with SASI. The past three years of working at SASI has given me insight into archival practices, from the usual flow of digitizing assets to metadata creation, to making these assets available to the public, as well as the historical importance of these tasks.

Throughout the 36-hour period, my team worked intensively to develop our project, fueled by many energy drinks, free meals, and engaging activities like an egg drop challenge, trivia, and sponsor panels where we got to talk to and learn from people pushing the tech industry forward with their work.

Alongside three other teammates, I focused on trying to make the workflow of archivists more efficient by leveraging AI to automatically generate the repetitive parts of creating metadata for digital collections and cataloguing. Our project aimed to save countless hours of manual cataloguing work while improving the accessibility and discoverability of archived materials.

We faced many challenges while turning our idea into a real working piece of software. Coordinating four people working on unique features became difficult when ‘git’, a version control tool for tracking code changes, started having merge conflicts. Similar changes in the same files meant we had to set aside one to two hours just to resolve conflicts and decide which work to keep and which to let go of. Despite the stress, tiredness, working through these problems with my teammates was genuinely a fun time. We managed to finish with a mostly working prototype in about 24 hours of actual development time. The rest of the hackathon we spent enjoying on-site activities and networking with recruiters from companies like Amazon, Shopify, and RBC.

The hackathon reinforced what I have learned working at SASI: technology has real potential to transform archival work. While our prototype was far from perfect, it proved that AI can meaningfully assist with the time-consuming task of metadata creation. When we presented our demo and pitch, the response was encouraging. Judges and attendees alike pushed us to continue developing this into a full-fledged product that could make a real impact for the archival community. I am excited to keep working on this and see how it can help archivists preserve and share important historical materials.

You can find out more about my work at dvnl.work.