· Event Recap
Winter 2025/26: a hackathon and four workshops
A GPU hackathon with Lyceum and Merantix Momentum, genomics with InstaDeep, explainable AI and multimodal agents with dida, and agentic AI with Google. Five hands-on events next to our Speaker Series.
Talks bring new ideas, but sometimes you want to write the code yourself. That is what our workshops are for: a partner from industry or research brings a hands-on session, and you bring your laptop. This winter, we had five of them:
- Hackathon with Lyceum and Merantix Momentum (23 October, Merantix AI Campus) – Two hours to make a baseline neural network faster and better with GPU acceleration software from Lyceum. There was €1,000 for the best model.
- InstaDeep: Foundational Models for Genomics (11 December) – Miguel Arbesú, Bernardo Almeida and Jonas Hirsch showed how foundation models decode genomic sequences and how to use them in practice. The room was a mix of data scientists, biologists and AI enthusiasts.
- dida: Theory Meets Practice #1 (7 January) – Reduan Achtibat (Fraunhofer HHI) on explainable AI for LLMs with layer-wise relevance propagation. Watch the recording.
- dida: Theory Meets Practice #2 (21 January) – Bilge Yücel (deepset) on multimodal agents with Haystack.
- Google: Unleash the Power of Agentic AI (3 February) – A hands-on session with Diana Nanova from Google.
Thank you to Lyceum, Merantix Momentum, InstaDeep, dida and Google, and to everyone who brought a laptop! Theory Meets Practice continued in the summer; read more in our recap of the series. All workshops are listed on the workshops page.
