Three Arizona State University students brought home top honors from HackHarvard 2025, one of the nation’s most competitive college hackathons. Computer science undergraduate students Pratham Hegde, Tushar Sachan and Tejas Gupta captured first place in the 3D Vision for Climate: Coolant’s Sustainability Challenge Track for their project, CarbonCompass — a tool powered by artificial intelligence, or AI, that helps entrepreneurs choose business locations with both profit and the planet in mind.
“It’s easy for startups to get caught up in the excitement of launching a new idea,” says Hegde, who studies cybersecurity in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. “We wanted to create something that helps founders see how their business decisions affect the environment before they open their doors.”
Hacking for a greener future
Hosted annually at Harvard University, HackHarvard is a 36-hour innovation sprint that attracts more than 500 undergraduate students from around the world. Participants race to design and prototype new technologies that tackle real-world problems, including those in AI, education and urban design.
The 2025 competition challenged students to think creatively about how 3D data visualization could promote environmental sustainability. For the ASU team, that challenge sparked the idea for CarbonCompass — a platform that bridges entrepreneurship and ecology through data-driven insights.
Introducing CarbonCompass
CarbonCompass gives users a way to visualize the environmental footprint of their business ideas. Aspiring entrepreneurs can type a short description — such as “eco café” or “local retail store” — and the app’s AI engine instantly recommends the most sustainable neighborhoods for that venture.
Through an interactive 3D Mapbox display, each location appears color-coded by a proprietary Green Score that blends multiple indicators, including energy efficiency, waste potential, walkability and transit access, safety and zoning risk.
Once users select a preferred location, they can take their analysis a step further by uploading 2D photos or videos of the space. Using Gaussian splatting, neural radiance fields and lidar techniques, CarbonCompass converts those raw images into a 3D model of the site. Infrared layers can then be applied to detect energy leaks, helping business owners reduce operating costs and minimize environmental impact by preventing unnecessary emissions, including the release of CFCs.
“Our vision is to make this technology an integral part of inspection,” says Sachan, who also serves as a volunteer researcher in the ASU Luminosity Lab. “We want CarbonCompass to help business owners from the very beginning, allowing them to find a suitable location, maintain it efficiently, and ultimately reduce their long-term carbon footprint.”
Behind the scenes, the team built a full-stack, cloud-native system that runs entirely on serverless infrastructure. The app uses React and TailwindCSS on the frontend, Cloudflare Workers for data processing, and Google’s Gemini API to interpret natural-language business ideas. The system stores session data and sustainability metrics in real time, making it both scalable and fast.
Building more than just an app
Developing CarbonCompass wasn’t easy. The team had to integrate environmental data from multiple sources, optimize AI computations to stay within HackHarvard’s time and resource limits, and design a minimalist interface that still conveyed complex sustainability insights.
Despite the technical hurdles, their persistence paid off. In just 36 hours, the SCAI students built what organizers called a “research-ready sustainability recommender” — one that could evolve into a practical tool for startups, city planners, and sustainability advocates.
Next steps
The team plans to continue developing CarbonCompass after their win. Future updates may include integrating real-time municipal data on emissions and waste, expanding to more cities, and adding exportable “Sustainability Briefs” for grant or startup applications.
For Hegde, who pursued research on mitigating vulnerabilities in Trusted Execution Environments through the Grand Challenge Scholars Program, and is currently working in the ASU Laboratory of Security Engineering for Future Computing, the experience at HackHarvard reinforced the power of combining innovation with impact.
“This win shows what ASU students can do when they bring together technology, creativity, and purpose,” he says.
Their victory adds to a growing list of national recognitions earned by SCAI students tackling big problems, from cybersecurity to climate tech. Faculty and peers alike see the team’s success as a reflection of the school’s mission to prepare students who don’t just build software but build solutions.
As the team refines CarbonCompass, one thing is clear: the next generation of innovators at SCAI isn’t just coding for the future. They’re designing a more sustainable one.