18/11/2025
This past weekend, the Cambridge Al Hackathon brought together over 70 students for an intensive 32-hour Hackathon. Co-organized by the Cambridge University Engineering Society (CUES), Cambridge Al Builder Club (a.k.a Claude Builder Club), Cambridge Al Safety Hub, and CUTEC - Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club, the event featured two distinct tracks: Al Application development and Al Safety research.
Participants submitted 13 impressive projects across both tracks. The Al Application track challenged teams to build hyper-personalized applications using Claude and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, moving beyond generic recommendations to create truly context-aware experiences. The Al Safety track had teams probing the inner mechanics of LLMs, investigating misalignment behaviors, and designing control protocols for agentic systems.
Standout projects include Personal Tripos Trainer. This tool uses facial sentiment analysis during lectures to identify moments of confusion or boredom. It then generates personalised study notes and quizzes tailored to each student’s understanding using the Claude API and computer vision. Another project is Safety-Probes-Research, an Al safety toolkit. It detects deceptive intent in large language models by probing their internal activations achieving 96-99.9% accuracy in identifying strategic deception in Llama 3.1 8B. This toolkit is production-ready with 1,000 paired training examples.
We also hosted a Model Context Protocol workshop to give participants hands-on experience with this cutting-edge technology, and our committee ensured every element of the weekend provided real learning value-not just competition.
And this is just the beginning as this year we are working towards developing the Cambridge tech ecosystem to foster more students to build here and ship to start their entrepreneurship journey. Watch out for upcoming events!
