New Taipei Smart City! Youth Teams Compete in AI Hackathon to Solve Five Municipal Challenges

With AI technology rapidly advancing, the New Taipei City Government held the '2026 New Taipei City AI Smart City Hackathon Competition' over two days, September 12 and 13, at the City Hall Grand Auditorium. The event attracted 245 participants forming 71 teams who advanced to the finals. Organized by the Youth Affairs Bureau, Education Bureau, Legal Affairs Bureau, Transportation Bureau, and Land Administration Bureau, the competition invited youth teams to propose AI-driven solutions to pressing municipal challenges, with five teams ultimately receiving awards. The Youth Affairs Bureau aims to harness youth creativity to meet actual city needs.

To help teams transform their ideas into functional prototypes, cloud service leader AWS provided pre-event training on generative AI, Agentic AI, and cloud computing, enabling youth to better utilize tools and unleash their creativity.

For the Land Administration Bureau’s challenge, 'AI-Assisted Review of Real Estate Valuation Cases,' the winning team 'AI City Rising Wind,' composed of three engineers, proposed a solution. They noted that tasks such as parcel number lookup and document filling were difficult to automate, and unfamiliarity with land administration posed initial research challenges. After consulting professional appraisers, they gained deeper insights into industry practices. In addition to automation, they enhanced user experience with playful animations—such as fireworks and moons—in the interface to make the system more engaging.

The Transportation Bureau’s 'Smart YouBike Dispatch' challenge was addressed by the team 'Wake Me When September Leaves,' made up of three high school friends. Their name comes from Green Day’s song 'Wake Me When September Ends.' As daily commuters relying on YouBike for transfers, they observed supply-demand imbalances at MRT stations during peak hours. They defined different user segments and used AWS-provided AI training services to develop optimized dispatch models.

For the Youth Affairs Bureau’s 'AI Integration of Youth Data,' the winning team 'TheWeeklyBlend' leveraged their experience in online course development and aligned it with their expertise in data science and AI architecture. They expressed gratitude for AWS’s support, which helped them understand how to apply data science, AI, and cloud security integration. Winning affirmed the validity of their AI framework design.

The Education Bureau’s 'Risk Monitoring for Childcare Institutions' challenge was tackled by the student team 'Zhong Zhi Min.' Their solution uses government data—including financial reports and penalty records—to predict risk scores for kindergartens. These scores (0–100) are further refined by analyzing public sentiment from social media platforms using large language models, then combined into a final risk score. They emphasized that the codebase could be retrained with more data and appreciated the abundant resources provided by the hackathon.

For the Legal Affairs Bureau’s 'Automation of Appeal Processes,' the winning team 'Direct Processing,' consisting of second-year master's students from Central University’s Information Management Department, proposed a system. Currently, after citizens receive administrative decisions, staff spend 3–5 hours drafting responses and determining whether to reject, revoke, or dismiss appeals. Their AI system reduces this to 3–5 minutes without sacrificing accuracy, significantly improving efficiency. They noted the competition’s unique two-day non-overnight format required rapid ideation and feasibility assessment. Feedback from judges proved valuable for both academic and future career development.

Highlighting the outstanding results of youth participation, the Youth Affairs Bureau emphasized its role in bridging young talent with government agencies and global tech leaders. Winning proposals will be evaluated by relevant city bureaus for potential real-world implementation. The bureau will also connect promising teams with startup incubators, advisory services, and entrepreneurial support to foster continued growth, aiming to make this hackathon a launchpad for youth innovation in AI-powered urban governance.

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