Championing AI for good: Building safer AI for youth mental health
Harness the power of AI to create solutions for youth mental wellness.
Lead the way: AI innovation for social impact right here at home
Join a groundbreaking Canadian collaboration between Bell, Mila, BUZZ HPC and Kids Help Phone on the country's most comprehensive AI ecosystem, Bell AI Fabric. From March 16-23, 2026, we're uniting top AI minds with deep expertise in youth mental health to build innovative AI solutions that empower young Canadians to interact safely with conversational AI tools and access e-mental health support at Kids Help Phone.
While conversational AI offers immense promise, it also carries risks, potentially amplifying psychological distress. This hackathon challenges you to use your voice, skills and lived experience to fortify the future of AI safety. We're inviting Canada's brightest minds in guardrail training, prompt engineering and synthetic data to stress-test and and develop systems and guidelines to strengthen AI support for youth mental wellness. Your mission: identify vulnerabilities and engineer robust defenses – build the armour that supports safer experiences for youth.
Your mission
Dive deep into three critical areas: Adversarial stress-testing, logic hardening and synthetic data augmentation.
Expert evaluation
Your solutions will be judged by a distinguished panel of AI safety experts, clinical psychologists and UX professionals. They'll assess your work based on safety, user experience and data quality.
Win big
Do your part to help support youth mental health and compete for a share of CAD 10,000 in monetary prizes and a chance at an exclusive internship with the Mila AI Safety Studio.
Participation is open for individual or team registrations. All participants need to meet the following criteria, which will be verified upon registration and prior to awarding prizes:
Age
Due to the sensitive nature of the materials, participants will be required to show proof of age 18+.
Inclusion
We're seeking solutions for the unique Canadian context that engineer inclusive, multilingual safety layers by enhancing performance in English and Canadian French – with a nuanced understanding of regional idioms – and recognizing diverse cultural expressions to proactively eliminate systemic bias.
Team composition
Great solutions are born from diverse perspectives. We’ll offer team-matching to help form balanced teams with a mix of technical and clinical experiences; specific compositions are not guaranteed.
Residence
All participants must reside in Canada.
Well-being and ethics
We prioritize participant well-being. Given the sensitive nature of this hackathon's focus on mental health, participants will be presented with a disclaimer regarding potential triggers.
Privacy first
Submissions must use only synthetic data. No real-world PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is allowed.
Terms and conditions
Additional details, including specific instructions for the hackathon, IP and terms and conditions, will be provided once your registration is confirmed.
Participation
The hackathon will be held virtually with the option to participate in-person at the Mila office in Montreal on March 16 and March 23. Participants attending either of both of the in-person events should be aware that there may be filming and interviews taking place. No participant is required to take part in interviews, but they should be aware that they might be visible in the background.
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