Ateneo data science students win bronze in Hack-A-Street Challenge 2025

Three BS Applied Mathematics major in Data Science (BS AMDSc) juniors, Val Allen Eltagonde, Miguel Antonio Germar, and Annika Marie Yunque, finished Second Runner-up and bagged Php 20,000 at the Hack-A-Street Challenge 2025 held on 17-18 January 2025 at the UP College of Science, Diliman, Quezon City.

Eltagonde, a DOST and Financial Aid scholar, Germar, a Merit and DOST scholar, and Yunque, a Director's List scholar, who was collectively known as Team Hippothesis, pitched Hakbang, a policy planning tool for local government units (LGUs) that aims to simulate the impacts of changes to street design and infrastructure on walkability. Hakbang evolved from a walkability and bikeability indexing model the team previously developed.

Hakbang evaluates both the walkability of a street and the walkability of an area. The walkability of a street is assessed based on design features such as sidewalk width, obstacles, and accessibility infrastructure. A machine learning model is trained to estimate a street’s walkability score from street design, using pedestrian survey data as ground truth. 

The walkability of an area is based on the routes that pedestrians are likely to take, factoring in preferences like shorter commutes or more walkable streets. Using a walkability curve inspired by the bikeability curve of Reggiani et al. (2021), Hakbang calculates tradeoffs between distance and comfort and shows how walkable an area is, in general, across the levels of mobility that different pedestrians may have. These curves enable comparisons between different locations or scenarios.

Integrating these into a user-friendly application, LGUs can simulate various design changes and their associated costs—such as widening sidewalks or removing obstructions—and determine its new score and walkability curves. Hakbang goes a step further by identifying the most impactful interventions, enabling smarter, budget-conscious decisions.

By offering actionable insights, Hakbang equips LGUs to prioritize street upgrades that maximize pedestrian comfort, safety, and mobility.

The Hack-A-Street Challenge, organized by the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, invites young innovators, programmers, coders, urban planners, and changemakers aged 18-32 to design digital solutions that transform our streets into pedestrian-friendly spaces.