Proposal for XRlabs, NVIDIA and Playground. Enter the passphrase from the email to continue.
Proposal A: a one day hack at the XRlabs office. Everything below is costed, dated and ready to run. Please share your thoughts.
Sunday 25th October, 11:00am to 7:00pm, at the XRlabs office.
A signing bonus for any finalist who joins XRlabs within six months, announced on the day.
Hardware and credits are pending NVIDIA's answer on the 19th. If they don't commit the card or hardware, please let us know what options you're considering.
Some engineers can come and pair up with applicants and build alongside them; one internal pair can enter as the benchmark team on the leaderboard, as the score to beat, outside the prizes.
£2,000 split three ways as above (not including the signing bonus).
| Line | Detail | XRlabs |
|---|---|---|
| Cash prizes | £1,000 / £600 / £400 (minimum recommendation) | £2,000 |
| Catering | 28 covers, brunch on arrival, pizza at 3pm | £1,200 |
| Snacks and drinks | Through the day, and after presentations | £300 |
| Freshers' poster, flyers, signage | £500 | |
| Merch | Bonus, not included in the total | +£500 |
| Contingency | Kit, overruns, the held-back seats | £300 |
| Venue | Your office | £0 |
| GPU, compute, speaker | NVIDIA, in kind | |
| Total | £4,300 |
Applications run on the Oxbridge AIx platform.
Applications include: GitHub or Scholar profile, something they've built, shown or linked, and confirmation they can be in London on the 25th.
No qualifier task. Every gate we add costs us strong people who are already employed and won't do homework to attend a hackathon, and they're exactly who you want.
50+ applications, we invite 30, we seat 20 in teams of two.
We over-invite on purpose: a half-empty room is the one failure that can't be fixed at 11am.
We shortlist on a rolling basis, so strong people get an answer within days while they're still excited, and we make it clear how exclusive it is.
Applications close 22nd October as a backstop, and we hold up to five seats back for anyone exceptional who lands late.
XRlabs dataset, train a classifier that differentiates between tools, deploy on NVIDIA hardware in the room, revealed on the day.
We'd publish the shape in advance, "real-time tool differentiation on proprietary surgical video, on provided hardware", while keeping specifics back.
Anyone who wants to warm up on an open dataset beforehand can, and can bring it with them; that buys a head start on tooling, not on the problem.
Scoring runs on our platform (we've built it for this) and we'll share the setup and rubric with your team in advance so you can shape the weightings rather than react to them.
More important than the scoreboard: every mentor writes one line on each person they worked with. Would I want them on the team? That's your actual signal.
Five hours of build time: long enough to get somewhere real, short enough that nobody coasts. The half hour between the last question and the results is deliberate. It's the only unstructured time in the day, everyone's still there, and it's when the conversations that lead somewhere actually happen.
HannaYin, our head of events, runs the day, with volunteers from OxVC (confirmed) and Oxford Entrepreneurs.
We need five XRlabs engineers for the full day, building in the pairs rather than supervising from the side, plus you and one or two others judging. This is the load-bearing commitment in the whole proposal. If five isn't possible on a Sunday, tell us now and we'll cut the field rather than thin the mentoring.
Distribution via 17,000 direct reach and community partners.
Applications open 21st September, into pre-term attention. Sent first to relevant departments.
Ali, we'd love to have you speak at an Oxbridge AIx Masterclass six days before the hackathon.
Every Monday, 5:00 to 6:30pm, online, 30 to 40 minutes on a topic entirely of your choosing, then questions. We've run over forty of these and the library sits on our platform; the audience is early-stage AI founders and builders across all three universities.
We advertise it before and after (including a short) during the week to get more attention.
People who are genuinely curious come and spend an hour listening to you talk about a problem you care about, and arrive at the hackathon already sold.
It lands three days before applications close, which turns the session into the deadline driver rather than a nice thing that happened. And several hundred people will see it live or in the library afterwards, rather more than the twenty who get into the room.
An Ask Me Anything works just as well if that week is busy, and needs no preparation at all. The campaign page has the format and the little we'd need from you.
The page will live at surgicalxr.oxbridgeaix.uk, and there's a first version already built (page 1 of this pack).
Applications run through our platform behind it, the same we use for the Oxbridge AI Challenge, but customised for this use case, so screening, scoring and the applicant pool all sit in one place with your team having access from day one.
If you'd rather point a subdomain of your own at it as well, we'll set that up.
The departmental route is the one people underrate. A physics or maths finalist who's been training models for three years doesn't read AI society mailing lists, and is often better than the people who do.
Freshers' Week gets a full-size poster alongside our shared stall, and the challenge gets mentioned from the front of the room at every event we run between then and the 25th. That drumbeat is worth more than any single announcement and costs nothing, because the events are happening anyway.
Real surgical AI with a founder who's a practising neurosurgeon; NVIDIA and Playground in the room; hardware and more to win.
We'll also work our network directly for engineers for you.
| By | Who | What |
|---|---|---|
| Fri 19 Sep | Ali | NVIDIA's answer on hardware vs compute, and whether they attend |
| Fri 26 Sep | Ali | Masterclass topic and title, a two-line summary and a headshot |
| Fri 3 Oct | Ali | Task and dataset signed off by your team. Playground confirmed |
| Fri 17 Oct | Ali | Reference environment tested end to end. Mentors named and diarised |
| Any time | Lilly | The group channel, whenever suits |
Everything else is ours: landing page, applications, screening, marketing, comms, run of show, day-of logistics and staffing.
We'll do weekly check-ins (15 min) with someone from your team and share weekly updates on the WhatsApp channel.
The likeliest failure, and it costs us the headline prize. We need a definite yes with a named contact and a shipping date. The fallback is simply to buy the card: a 5090 is about £2,000 retail, and if NVIDIA hasn't committed hardware by 3rd October, XRlabs buys one and the poster never changes. Cheapest insurance on the whole plan.
We've been burned by an investor pulling out days before an event built around them. We'll ask Playground and NVIDIA explicitly whether their yes is a definite yes, and hold a back-pocket name for each.
We've got a founder working in robotics (YC) who we'd like to invite to be part of the judging panel.
No slack in it. 25th October, or December.
Proposal B, the 2-Stage Challenge, is on the next page of this pack and in its own email.
Udai Dhamija
Founder & President, Oxbridge AIx
team@oxbridgeaix.uk