Databricks Hackathon @ Queens College 2026

About the challenge:

When a New Yorker sees a rat, they call 311. When the Health Department inspects a restaurant, every violation gets a code. Both records are public. Nobody has told you whether they agree.

Your job is to build a Service Gap Index for every ZIP code in New York City and a dashboard where anyone can type in their own ZIP and find out how their block is being served.

This isn't a rat map. The question is: when someone calls for help, does the city show up? You'll have 51,000 rodent complaints from 2025 to now, 158,000 restaurant health violations, and one dataset of 3,023 Central Park squirrels that has nothing to do with anything.

All data is provided, cleaned, and ready. You won't spend a minute hunting for files. You'll spend it making the data trustworthy, which is the harder skill and the one that gets people hired.

Fair warning: the obvious analysis is wrong. There's something hidden in this data that will make a careless team publish a conclusion that's the opposite of the truth. Finding it is the work.