Center for AI in Business, UMD Students Tackle Food Insecurity

The Smith School presented the first university-wide AI case competition for undergraduate and master’s students on “AI and Food Insecurity” on April 24, 2025.

The Robert H. Smith School of Business’s Center for Artificial Intelligence in Business (CAIB) hosted the competition in collaboration with the NourishNet NSF Convergence Accelerator. A partnership with Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB) made it possible.

The cross-disciplinary challenge drew more than 100 students from across the University of Maryland (UMD) to explore how artificial intelligence can be used as an agent for good, to alleviate, at the community level, food insecurity—USDA-defined as not having enough to eat and not knowing where the next meal will come from.

“The case competition was born out the confluence of three things: Governor Wes Moore’s recent ENOUGH Act and related Neighborhood Impact Grant – both efforts to alleviate food insecurity, the strength of artificial intelligence at UMD, and UMD’s 2024-2025 First Year Book, “Poverty, by America,” explains Wedad Elmaghraby, senior associate dean for faculty and dean's chair of operations management.

Capital Area Food Bank, as the DC area's largest food bank, helped provide 64 million meals to those in need last year. Professor Vanessa Friar Martinez, of the UMD School of Information, a member of the competition leadership team with extensive research in the area of food insecurity notes, “From their recent report, about a third of adults in the area may have been food insecure during the last year – a strikingly larger number than anyone would have expected. Unfortunately, this includes children, students and working families struggling to make ends meet.”

Participating students were presented with real challenges facing the CAFB. “The problems ranged from helping food insecure individuals more easily find places to go to, helping farmers and others who provide food coordinate logistics better, and helping generate content that can reach the right person at the right time,” explains Balaji Padmanabhan, CAIB director and dean's professor of decisions, operations and information technologies. “The food bank’s remarkable and forward-looking CEO, Radha Muthiah, had reached out last year to discuss potential ways in which AI might be able to contribute.”

Padmanabhan adds, “With four amazing doctoral students and leaders from Capital Area Food Bank, we highlighted areas where AI can help address issues pertaining to food insecurity.” The subsequent competition—its context —turned out to be “far more complex than a typical hackathon,” Padmanabhan says. “The students, with a real-world setting in which they had the potential to make a difference, learned about AI and figured out how to design and build prototypes to address the issues in these cases.”

The AI and Food Insecurity challenge culminated with more than 30 teams presenting their prototypes of voice bots, virtual assistants and other AI-enabled tools to 12 judges. “The judges had a very difficult time selecting winners,” says Elmaghraby. “The judges were all blown away, as were we, with the caliber of the submissions and how the prototypes demonstrated AI tools’ potential as game-changers for non-profit organizations in achieving their goals in a resource-constrained environment.”

Smith Dean Prabhudev Konana presented five teams with winning checks of $2,500 each. “More than the cash prize, we hope that this event will help spearhead internship opportunities for participating students,” Padmanabhan says. “We will circulate the best solutions in each case to several industry advisory board members, increasing the chances of students securing summer internships.”

Elmaghraby says the benefit to the participating students is further dimensional. “This experience can be a useful component of resumes to signal the ability to work with teams, think outside the box on pressing issues facing society, and willingness to take on new challenges.”

Summaries for each UMD PhD student-led case challenge:

Case 1 (video) led by Jason Ding (human-centered AI) and Andy Li (marketing): Food insecurity is a complex issue. There are many who need help, but do not seek it. There are those who need food but do not know where to go for it. This case asked teams to design or develop an AI-based solution that can help those who need food understand where to go to get it.

Case 2 (video) led by Hanwen Shi (information systems): Capital Area Food Bank has many partners, such as grocery stores or farmers who provide food (vegetables, meat, etc.) that can be distributed to food pantries. Many of these partners (grocery stores, farmers, etc.) have questions that need to be answered (i.e., “Where can we deliver food? What types of food are needed?” etc.). Currently, the organization opens “customer service tickets” to answer these questions, and this is a time- and person-intensive process. Can AI help improve the efficiency of this process?

Case 3 (video) led by Brandon Colelough (computer science): Capital Area Food Bank spends a large amount of time developing grant proposals, reports, presentations, blog posts, and social media content regarding the work they do. Can generative AI help do this more easily, better, faster?

The AI and Food Insecurity judges were:

• Alex Miller, data scientist for the Innovation Team, Executive Office of the Governor
• Robin Wiener, Get Real Consulting founder and Center for Global Business Advisory Board member
• Sabrina Tadele, CAFB director of strategic initiatives
• Jeannie Shaughnessy, CEO of the Peanut and Tree Nut Processors Association
• Lorie Wijntjes, director of AI Business Integration and Governance for GuideWell
• Scott Kuschmider, VP for Global Public Affairs and Trade, Bayer Crop Science
• Danielle Harmon, CAFB Manager of Customer Service
• Stephen Struss, CAFB Business Applications and Data Administrator
• Christine Schaff, faculty director for Smith Business Leadership Fellows
• Ashrit Kulkarni, lead technical architect at Treasure Data
• Anna Beavan, LindaBen Foundation Inc. founder and executive director
• Hilary Salmon, CAFB senior director of marketing and communications

Read more about Smith’s Center for Artificial Intelligence in Business.