Maheen Rassell
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Projects

Things I built in a weekend.

Five hackathon awards and a top 5, from AI security systems to rap battles and goats. Here's what each one does and how we built it.

  1. 01LOCKDOWN.cvWinner
  2. 02Raise The Bar!2× winner
  3. 03Grazing Goat2nd place
  4. 04Paw & OrderWinner
  5. 05Story Generation AppTop 5

(01) Winner, Best AI Automation TrackTech@NYU × HOF Startup Week Buildathon · 2026

LOCKDOWN.cv

Turns existing CCTV into an autonomous security layer that spots boundary breaches and escalates threats.

What it does

Monitors four camera feeds at once with facial recognition, restricted-zone enforcement and door access control, all from one dashboard. When someone unauthorized shows up, a multi-agent pipeline takes over: a Nemotron vision model analyzes the threat, Nemotron Super checks the person’s history in Supabase and picks an escalation level (routine, urgent or critical), and Claude writes a formal incident report rendered to PDF. Security staff get a Twilio SMS and an ElevenLabs voice call at the same time.

How it’s built

React + Vite dashboard that captures frames every 400ms, with canvas overlays for drawing restricted zones and boundary lines straight onto live feeds. A FastAPI backend handles face recognition (OpenCV DNN + ArcFace embeddings), door detection (YOLOv8) and zone enforcement (ray-casting for polygons, side-tracking for line crossings).

Hardest part

Keeping face recognition reliable across four feeds without lag. We tuned capture intervals and added sticky identity tracking so a label survives when a face leaves the frame but the body is still visible.

My part

Planned the agent orchestration and tool calling for violations, wrote the Supabase logic, and integrated Databricks UDFs and the Genie model.

(02) Winner, Best Beginner + Best Use of FeatherlessDevFest 2026, Columbia · 2026

Raise The Bar!

Freestyle rap battles with your friends, live transcription, and an AI DJ who judges your bars.

What it does

Two players get four words and battle out loud. DJ Dev, an AI judge, scores each verse on its bars and word complexity, gives feedback, and calls the winner.

How it’s built

A React web app using ElevenLabs for DJ Dev’s voice, Supabase to store verses, and Featherless open-source models plus K2-Think to rate and grade each opponent.

Hardest part

Landing on an idea nobody had done before, then shipping it through flaky model APIs with a team where half of us were at our first hackathon.

My part

Spit the bars in the live demo.

(03) 2nd placeJumboHack 2025, Tufts · 2025

Grazing Goat

Goats as a service: GPS-tracked goats that graze overgrown land to prevent wildfires.

What it does

California’s controlled burns emit huge amounts of CO2 and leave land dry. Grazing Goat rents GPS-tracked goats to organizations that need vegetation cleared, and tracks the CO2 saved compared with burning.

How it’s built

A website and tracking dashboard built on WebSim that visualizes wildfire risk, grazing coverage and CO2 impact, backed by a model estimating emissions avoided versus traditional methods. Branding in Illustrator and InDesign.

Hardest part

Staying focused. The idea kept growing into agriculture, fashion and carbon offsets, so we had to scope a sharp wildfire story while leaving room to scale.

(04) Winner, Best Use of MongoDB AtlasHack@Brown 2025 · 2025

Paw & Order

An LLM-powered courtroom game that helps shy kids build debate and conversation confidence.

What it does

Kids enter a virtual courthouse, get a random stance, and debate another player for one minute. An LLM judges argument strength and quality and picks the winner, so practice feels like a game instead of a performance.

How it’s built

React and TypeScript on the front end, MongoDB on the back end, and the OpenAI API for judging and feedback.

Hardest part

Real-time player-versus-player: getting two people into the same debate room at once. It was also our first time using MongoDB.

My part

Built the backend and the AI integration, including the judging prompts.

(05) Top 5NVIDIA × Vercel Hackathon · 2025

Story Generation App

Personalized children’s comics generated from a single prompt.

What it does

Turns a prompt into a personalized children’s comic, with consistent characters across panels.

How it’s built

Next.js 15 and React 19 with Tailwind, orchestrating multi-step AI pipelines on NVIDIA NIM vision-language models (Llama 3.3, Consistency NIM), with TypeScript APIs and image-validation middleware for error handling.

Also built

  • Aurangzeb

    E-commerce

    Storefront on Next.js, PostgreSQL and Prisma with Stripe payments, webhook-driven order flows, React-Three-Fiber 3D apparel previews, and an admin dashboard for drops and inventory.

  • Kalendar

    Social calendar

    A shared calendar for friends built on Next.js and Postgres Realtime. Drew a 50-person waitlist before launch.

  • Inventory Manager

    Web app

    Pantry and storage tracker with full CRUD, Firebase real-time sync, and Firestore offline caching.

  • AI Chatbot

    LLM

    A GPT-4 chatbot with system prompts tuned for clear, respectful, accurate answers.

See experience & leadership