🚀 About the Hackathon

In-Person & Virtual: August 30–31, 2025 — 24‑hour global AI sprint.
Join us in Paris or fully online.

👥 Who Should Join

Builders who ship running code (no pitch-only projects)
Individuals or teams of up to 4
Technical roles encouraged: ML engineers, full-stack, data scientists, product/UX

📜 Rules & Deliverables

Teams of max 4; work must be created or substantially extended during the hackathon
Submit a project including:
- Project Name & Description
- Products & Tools Used
- Team Contributions
Optionally, link a 2-minute demo video (deployed service or local demo)
Submit a GitHub repo (public or private with access), README, and optional project website

Judging Criteria: 🔎 Detailed Scoring

Criterion	Weight
Technical	35%
Innovation	25%
Presentation	20%
Assets	20%
Bonus (survey & feedback)	+10%

Submission Checklist (before Aug 31, 3:00 PM)

GitHub repo + README with run instructions
Deployed demo link or local test instructions
1‑page slides or README problem/impact summary
2‑minute demo video (recommended)
Required credentials/access for judges
Short note on Responsible AI & limitations

🤝 Sponsors & Organizers

Mentorship from MIT, Harvard, and industry leads — ask questions on the message board
Free compute credits & platform access — details provided to registered teams
Key sponsors & partners: SarApi, Schoolab, FinTech Dev Night, Lovable, Aethos.org, SarAI, Conduit.ai

🧑‍🏫 Mentors & Office Hours

Sign up for mentor sessions and Bring specific asks to maximize feedback (e.g., “debug agent loop”, “scale retrieval”)

Highlighted Mentors:
Lodovico BENVENUTI (Early Stage…)
Alaa ABDULRIDHA (Search…)
Vrinda BHATIA (MCP…)
Ammar EKBOTE (PaaS…)
Sujata SRIDHARAN (Fintech…)
Abdoulaye DOUCOURE (Seed for Good…)
—

🛠 Suggested Tech Stack & Tooling

LLM / Models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Cohere, Hugging Face, Google Gemini
Integration Frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack
Agent Frameworks: LangChain Agents, AutoGPT/BabyAGI (be cautious of safety/loops)
Vector DBs / Retrieval: Weaviate, Pinecone, Milvus
MLOps & Monitoring: Weights & Biases, MLflow, logging + health endpoints
Hosting / Deployment: Vercel, Koyeb, Heroku, Cloud Run, Docker + ngrok
In-browser / Edge LLMs: WebLLM, Ollama, on-device inference

📁 Starter Repo Structure (Suggested)

/README.md        → run instructions, API keys  
/app              → frontend/demo  
/backend          → model integration, APIs  
/data             → sample data & indexing  
/infra            → Dockerfiles & deploy scripts  
/presentation     → slides + demo video links

💡 Project Idea Prompts

Ethical AI: transparency, fairness, privacy-preserving solutions
Agentic AI: autonomous planning and execution
In-browser personal LLM with local retrieval & privacy
Multimodal search: image+text retrieval for e-commerce or research
FinTech: explainable models for transaction categorization, compliance, or support agents
Conversational RAG systems with evaluation pipeline

⚡ Hacking Tips & Priorities

Scope small: one happy path + working demo > many features
Start with tiny or synthetic datasets to prove flow
Use managed services to avoid infrastructure time sinks
Containerize early for consistent demos
Record short guided demo video in case of network issues

🛡 Support & Logistics

Venue / registration questions: registration page
Remote participants: join Discord to connect with teammates

🔐 Responsible AI & Data Privacy

Explicitly state data provenance and model usage in README & slides
Avoid uploading PII without consent
Include limitations & safety note in submission

📬 Contacts & Help

Event page & RSVP: Hackathon Event
Organizers (Paris): Abdoulaye DOUCOURE + team
Urgent ops issues: Message Board

💡 Build fast, demo clearly, and have fun!
We’re watching for creative, reproducible projects that ship working code.

AI Hackathon - Paris Uniting Innovators Worldwide

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