Overview
The Cornell Six Sigma Hackathon is a team sprint for Cornell Systems Engineering students. Teams choose a quality control or reliability prompt, invent the dataset they need, and build a working quality-control tool. The event is hosted by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with on-campus participation in Upson Hall 116 and a distance learning track. Registration and submissions run through Devpost.
The page emphasizes that the statistics are the graded core of the event. Expected analysis includes statistical process control, process capability, reliability modeling, and failure analysis. The software application, such as a dashboard or web app built with React or Shiny, is the delivery vehicle for that analysis rather than the main point.
Schedule
The event has two timing formats:
- On-campus version: 24 hours, from October 16 at 3:00 PM to October 17 at 3:00 PM (EDT). This is required for on-campus students unless excused.
- Virtual distance learning (DL) challenge: 7 days, from October 16 at 3:00 PM to October 23 at 3:00 PM (EDT). This is required for distance learning students and anyone who cannot attend in person.
Prompts are revealed at the start of the event, and each prompt is tied to a dataset that teams design and build themselves.
Who can participate
The page lists eligibility for Cornell Systems Engineering students in the MEng or MS program, or students enrolled in SYSEN 5300, MAE 5390, or SYSEN 5900. Teams may have up to 5 members, and a team of 2 to 5 is required. Students without a team can sign up through a form and will be matched with others. Companies and professional organizations are excluded from participation. The page also lists participants as above the legal age of majority in their country of residence.
Prompts
On-campus prompts include:
- Urban Systems: Bikeshare Fleets, addressing dock availability and maintenance dispatch during rush hour.
- Health Systems: Emergency Response, addressing variation in ambulance on-scene times across city zones.
- Energy Systems: Smart Grid Transformer Surges, addressing load monitoring and modeling for local step-down transformers.
- Industrial Systems: Drone Delivery Fleet Maintenance, addressing technician logging of wear and tear before and during flight.
Distance learning prompts include:
- Industrial Systems: 3D Printing for Aerospace, addressing whether printing processes can meet aerospace tolerances for titanium brackets.
- Health Care Systems: Blood Banks, addressing supply integrity and failure prediction for refrigeration and backup power.
- Urban Systems: Civil Liberties, addressing monitoring of enforcement and surveillance practices outside their approved contexts.
The page also describes a data collection challenge in which teams must define the proxy variables that field workers or citizens need to log.
Format and deliverables
Teams must ship a dashboard or web app and any supporting tools needed to make it work, such as an R or Python library or a public REST API. The app must be deployed live to the course Posit Connect server, with publisher credentials provided at the event. The page encourages AI-assisted development using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or Gemini CLI, and provides an agent context bundle to help assistants start oriented.
Judging criteria
Event staff score each project from 0 to 100. The published criteria include:
- Effective, working tool (25 points)
- Performs valid analysis in R or Python (25 points)
- Scope match with a prompt (5 points)
- Clear use case (5 points)
- Clear, minimal requirements (5 points)
- Demonstration using test datasets (10 points)
- Documentation (10 points)
- Test datasets (5 points)
- Dataset explainers, including a codebook and README (5 points)
- Reproducibility with public GitHub code (5 points)
Prizes
On-campus participants compete for a winner dinner at the Statler Dining Room for their team, available only to eligible on-campus students. Distance learning participants compete for a winner title with bragging rights. The page lists two non-cash prizes in total.
Judges
The judges listed are Timothy Fraser, Assistant Teaching Professor in Systems Engineering at Cornell University, Thomas (Chenghao) Wu, Course Assistant at Cornell University, and Tolkien Bagchi, PhD Candidate in Systems Engineering at Cornell University.
Questions
The page directs questions to the hackathon manager by email and links to a frequently asked questions section on the event's GitHub repository.
