Hackathons give teams a concentrated space to turn ideas into working prototypes with support from experienced mentors. At the 10th AimtecHackathon in 2026, I again mentored teams working with AI, LLMs, local models, speech recognition and synthesis, language technologies, and Python. The weekend also highlighted the sustained work of Petra Šteklová, Jiří Dobrý, and the Aimtec team in supporting Plzeň's hacker community.
My mentoring covered AI and machine learning, LLMs and local models, speech recognition and synthesis, language technologies, and Python. Teams could also use an Ollama server to experiment with language models and connect them to their prototypes during the hackathon.
Mentoring often started with the team’s idea: what the model should do, what data was available, and how the result would fit into the prototype. A small experiment or a timely architecture discussion could quickly show which approach was worth developing during the limited time.
The HackIT format gives teams 40 hours and access to mentors while they develop projects, many of them aimed at helping people with disabilities. This combination of rapid engineering and a concrete user need has kept me returning to the event.
I am grateful to Petra Šteklová and Jiří Dobrý for their work on the event, and to the whole Aimtec team for the long-term support they give the hacker community. Reaching the tenth edition says a great deal about the organisers’ persistence and the community that has grown around the hackathon.
Links
- AimtecHackathon: The event website with the HackIT format, mentors, projects, partners, and information about Moving Station Plzeň.
- FAV members at AimtecHackathon 2026: The University of West Bohemia article about Faculty of Applied Sciences mentors and speakers at the event.
- KKY ZČU technical notes: Technical notes for speech recognition, speech synthesis, and other technologies available to hackathon teams.