Posted 6 August, 2026
Iowa youth are gaining national attention for their innovative use of artificial intelligence to address real-world challenges, with three Iowa students earning top national honors and several others recognized as state winners in the 2026 National 4-H Artificial Intelligence Challenge.
Hosted by National 4-H, the challenge encourages young people to apply artificial intelligence to meaningful community issues while developing skills in computer science, critical thinking, ethics and innovation. Participants design AI-powered solutions that address challenges facing their communities and present their ideas through a national project showcase.
National 4-H announced winners in July 2026, recognizing projects that demonstrated technical excellence, creativity, innovation and meaningful community impact.
Iowa Youth Earn National Recognition
Second Place Nationally: Intelligent Municipal Finance
In the Ages 16–18 Division, David Shi and Srihari Kumaresan earned Second Place Nationally for their project, “Intelligent Municipal Finance,” an AI-powered early warning system designed to help Iowa's local governments and school districts identify financial waste before it becomes a larger problem.
The recognition marks the team's second national AI honor of 2026, following their advancement to the national finals of the Presidential AI Challenge, where they presented the project at the White House.
"The problem we are solving is financial waste in Iowa's local governments and school districts," said Shi. “Patterns that an algorithm would catch in seconds, like duplicate invoices or unusually high vendor charges, can go undetected for months or years.”
The system uses AI to flag unusual spending patterns, identify potential duplicate payments, review contracts for risky language and forecast potential budget concerns months in advance. The tool is designed to support, not replace, human decision-making.
"The system never makes decisions on its own," the team explained in their project. “It flags, explains and alerts. Every action is taken by a human administrator who can read the reasoning in plain language.”
By helping communities identify inefficiencies earlier, the team believes the technology could improve transparency, strengthen accountability and protect valuable public resources. "If just a 1% efficiency improvement is achieved across Iowa's municipal and school district budgets, the system could generate $50 to $100 million in annual savings statewide," Kumaresan said.
Second Place Nationally: Project Hawkeye
In the Ages 13–15 Division, Mayank Bhatt earned Second Place Nationally for his project, Project Hawkeye, an AI-powered system that uses satellite imagery to identify suspected illegal dump sites across Iowa and help protect the state's groundwater resources.
Growing up in Johnston, Bhatt became interested in the largely unseen environmental challenge of illegal dumping. These sites can leak chemicals and other pollutants into the soil and groundwater, posing risks to the nearly 300,000 Iowans who rely on private wells for drinking water.
"The problem is not just the dumping itself, it is that nobody knows where most of these sites are," Bhatt said. “The sites that have never been reported, never been inspected and never been found are the dangerous ones.”
To address this challenge, Mayank built an AI system that scans aerial imagery from all 99 Iowa counties to identify visual signs of possible illegal dumping. Using two AI models and a multistep validation process, Project Hawkeye searches for patterns such as disturbed soil, unusual land features and scattered waste that may indicate contamination risks.
The results were significant. Project Hawkeye identified 600 high-confidence suspected illegal dump sites, including nearly 300 classified as urgent concerns. Many of those sites were located near private groundwater wells and were not included in existing government databases.
"The Iowa DNR knew about 28 sites. Project Hawkeye found 600 more," Bhatt said. “That gap is not a failure of the DNR; it's a reflection of how difficult this problem is to solve without AI.”
Each location identified by the system includes GPS coordinates, risk assessments and mapping information that could help regulators prioritize future investigations.
"What makes AI powerful is that it can process amounts of data that would take humans years to analyze and do it in minutes," Bhatt said.