Team Synapse just won 1st place at the 2026 UMD Smith Agentic AI Challenge. $4,000. Real industry problem. Built and shipped in a day.
The problem came from OnAsset Intelligence — pharmaceutical shipments moving across the world, live sensor data streaming in real time, and operations teams consistently finding out about failures too late. Temperature deviations, shock events, routing delays — by the time the alert reaches the right person, the damage is already downstream.
We built an AI Cargo Monitor: 8 agents that coordinate the moment a shipment is at risk — flagging compliance issues, finding backup facilities, rerouting carriers, rescheduling patient appointments, and drafting insurance claims. A human stays in the loop and signs off before anything is acted on.
The decision I'm most proud of: only 2–3 of those 8 agents use an LLM. The rest are deterministic. Pharma logistics doesn't need creativity — it needs auditable, traceable decisions that hold up to scrutiny. Knowing when not to use an LLM turned out to be the real engineering challenge.
Grateful to have figured that out alongside Karthik Ramanathan, Nikhil Sumesh, Rahul Sharma and Yash Oulkar — and to Professor Manmohan Aseri and the Robert H. Smith School of Business for building a challenge around problems that actually matter to someone.
Team Synapse · UMD Smith Agentic AI Challenge · April 24, 2026 · 1st Place