MSIS students win 1st place at UCLA x Google DeepMind Hackathon

Published April 22, 2026

MSIS students Sejal Daterao and Harsha Vardhan won First place at the UCLA GLITCH@UCLA × Google DeepMind Hackathon.

Sejal and Harsha Vardhan created AuraRoom during a brainstorm that started with a simple question: what if a room could feel the energy of the people inside it and respond?

48 hours later, it could.

Here’s all you need to know about AuraRoom:

AuraRoom is an always-on atmosphere AI that senses a group’s collective emotional state in real time. It streams video and audio into Gemini, smooths mood signals so the system thinks before it reacts, adapts music through Lyria, generates visuals with Imagen, and steps in with a voice only when the room actually needs it.

Nobody typed anything. Nobody pressed anything. Nobody asked it to do anything.

It just watched the room. Read the energy. Decided the atmosphere needed to shift and shifted it.

Music changed. Visuals generated. Voice appeared.

No prompts. No inputs. The AI just pays attention.