Congratulations, team DSVx!
Four PhD students, a graduated master’s student and a data scientist from Ericsson teamed up for a hackathon. The result? Success. The team – DSVx – reached second place!
Alfreds Lapkovskis, Ali Beikmohammadi, Tim Kreuzer, Mohsen Amiri are all PhD students at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University. Together with Natalia Nefedova, a graduated master’s student from DSV, and Meysam Masoudi, a data scientist from Ericsson, they formed DSVx.
The team took on the challenge to build a production-ready enterprise system, using AI-prompting and low-code. Low-code is an approach that allows to build software visually, minimizing the need to write code manually.
Their solution rendered them a second place in a hackathon on March 26, 2025. We asked Alfreds Lapkovskis to share his thoughts and experiences from the intensive day where more than 80 developers in 12 teams competed.
Congrats Alfreds! How do you feel now?
“Thanks! We decided to join the hackathon for fun, and we were happy to win the second place. It is quite good! It seemed that the jury liked our solution, they were engaged during the presentation. They liked the humor that Tim added when he was presenting, and I think they liked the feature, overall.”
The task was to provide an original solution to improve the onboarding process
Can you tell us a little bit about the hackathon?
“Sure, the theme was to explore what we can build with generative AI and low-code platforms to provide a better onboarding journey for employees. New employees who undergo effective onboarding are more likely to succeed and perform well. Additionally, with the rise of remote work, onboarding has grown both more complex and more critical. Therefore, the task was to provide an original solution to improve the onboarding process.”
What was your solution to the problem?
“We focused on the problem of overwhelming information in the onboarding systems. These systems may contain many documents, tasks, employees and other things. And it can be difficult to navigate in all that effectively. So, we came up with a solution to use Large Language Models to cluster information within the system semantically. This displays to the user an automatically built interactive visualization of the system, which is easy to navigate and explore. The user can also type a question which will make the system rebuild the visualization, presenting the information relevant to the question.”
How did you develop the idea, and how can it be used?
“Initially, I came up with this idea in discussion with Ali. He was talking about ‘gamification’, that we could implement some game-like approach in our system. After some thinking, I came up with idea to visualize the information interactively in our system. We shaped the details of the final idea in discussions with the team. What we implemented is a good prototype and proof-of-concept, and we believe it can potentially be extended to a real production-ready functionality, which can be applied not only for onboarding systems, but to knowledge bases, task tracking systems, and so on.”
The process was fun and interesting
What was it like working together?
“It was a little bit stressful before the presentation and also after, while waiting for the results. But the process was fun and interesting. We learnt that we need to approach hackathon tasks realistically, and define what and how we are going to implement, considering what time and capabilities we have. The goal is not to provide the best possible fully-featured solution, but a good, interesting, original and clear piece of functionality, given the time constraints.”
What happens next for team DSVx?
“We are planning to participate in more hackathons. We like the solution that we implemented, but we will likely continue working on different things. This was an interesting experience though”, says Alfreds Lapkovskis.
More information
Team DSVx was not the only DSV team to participate in the hackathon. Two more teams had strong DSV representation:
Team P – SU Heroes included six students from DSV’s Master programmes in Information Security, Computer and Systems Sciences, and Strategic Information Systems Management. Their project uses AI to enhance onboarding by matching new employees with communities, mentors and events, making workplace integration smoother.
Team Snack Overflow included two students from DSV’s bachelor programmes in Interaction Design, and Computer and Systems Sciences. Their project focuses on helping managers keep the onboarding process alive over time, with automated reminders for onboarding managers and an AI-powered chatbot.
Read about Team Snack Overflow
The AI + Low-Code Hackathon was organised by AWS, OutSystems and Cillers in Stockholm on March 26, 2025, from 08:30 to 19:00.
Text: Åse Karlén
Last updated: April 1, 2025
Source: Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, DSV