Dallas Baptist University had three teams take part in Gloo's annual AI Hackathon for the first time this year. The in-person event was held Oct. 6–8 in Boulder, Colo., and drew 1,000 registrants from 12 countries, 34 states and 25 universities, according to Gloo representative Kaelyn Brooks. Sharon Gorikapudi, a DBU professor and program director of the university's Master of Science in Ethical AI & Strategic Decision Sciences, said 24 DBU students participated.
One DBU project, called Kairos, is a tool that sits on top of a church's existing systems. According to the project description, it reads signals such as attendance, giving, volunteering and prayer requests, and decides whether an automated message should go out or a person should step in. Gorikapudi said the project description pointed to a case where an automated donor appeal sent after a prayer request for a family health crisis could cause real harm.
A second DBU project, Bridgeline, was led by Shenli Pei. It aims to help smaller ministries, where pastors often carry heavy workloads alone. The project description describes an AI-assisted platform that takes a pastor from a plain-language description of a need to a confirmed, tracked support request.