Garrett Yoshimi, chief information officer for the University of Hawaii, challenged teams at the tenth annual University of Hawaii hackathon to build an AI-powered tool to help students chart personalized pathways from education to careers.

Yoshimi said the system should help “thousands upon thousands of students” by connecting students’ interests and existing skills to specific programs, courses and credentials. He framed the project as an effort to move beyond a largely linear education-to-career model and toward a more personalized experience that can scale for the university’s systemwide enrollment.

At the event Yoshimi described an initial example and data resources teams can use. He pointed to Google’s CareerDreamer as a starting reference, calling it “a very compelling marriage of vast data resources with a pretty cool user experience,” and said University of Hawaii staff have already extracted datasets to provide inputs for competing teams’ AI solutions.

Yoshimi asked teams to build what he called the “UHAI Pathfinder” to translate a student’s stated interests or existing skills into actionable recommendations. He offered a concrete example for students who already have some data science foundation but lack cloud-computing or neural-network skills: “Well, here's your recommendation. Take a look at ICS 491F and ICS 499, available this spring at Manoa,” Yoshimi said, citing course identifiers he recommended as part of a pathway.

He emphasized the scale of the challenge: the university system’s credit-enrollment recently exceeded 50,000 students, which he said creates a need for personalization “at scale.” Yoshimi described the intended audience broadly — from middle- and high-school students to those already in a career seeking a change — and urged participants to find “that right program, maybe a specific set of credit or noncredit courses” that could serve as on-ramps and off-ramps to career goals.

Yoshimi closed by inviting teams to take on the challenge and noting supplemental materials and links were available for participants at the event page, including a link he said was “at the bottom of the page” to Google’s CareerDreamer experiment.

The presentation acknowledged University of Hawaii at Manoa as an example campus for course recommendations and credited Enterprise Technology Services staff for organizing the hackathon. No formal vote or funding decision was recorded during the presentation; Yoshimi’s remarks were a call for project submissions from teams at the competition.