Legacy Luminary (1st place)

Prize: Portable monitors, solar powered power banks, and £100 Amazon vouchers. MLH Winner Pins

Solar Spark (2nd place)

Prize: Mechanical keyboards!
Kindly provided by the Keyboard Company. MLH Winner Pins

For the team that best embodies the DurHack spirit!

Prize: Smart Garden Kit

Brief:

Participants must develop an AI-driven solution that solves a common, real-world problem experienced by students, professionals, or communities. This can be something that saves time, increases accessibility, reduces stress, or improves sustainability. The focus is on usability, innovation, and real impact.

Challenge Constraints:

Teams must use at least one AI/ML or GenAI component (e.g., LLMs, vision models, or custom ML models).
Projects should have a working prototype or demo by the end of the hackathon.
Solutions must be designed with ethical AI principles in mind (fairness, privacy, explainability).

Prizes: Raspberry Pi 5 and £25 Amazon Vouchers for the winning team

‘Create a crystal ball that can predict something unique…’
Nintendo Switch 2’s for the winning team!

Make a project that explores the idea of a Bridging Worlds.

Interpret the theme however you think best captures the spirit of this idea! You could …
Map data between domains to uncover new insights
Interface between systems that operate independently
Design a system for human-AI collaboration

Please come and chat to us if you're looking for inspiration!

Prizes: iPads and exclusive Marshall Wace stash!

Our pre-built instant-messaging UIs make it easy to add chat to your website or app. We just released a brand-new SDK that lets you create a custom theme with arbitrary javascript code for COMPLETE CONTROL over how the chat looks and works.

Our challenge: Head to https://talkjs.com/durhack and follow the instructions to build something cursed with our newest SDKs. The winner will be the hack that user our SDK in the most chaotic, heavily customised, totally unexpected way.

Prize: 4x Flipper Zero

Build, break, and secure - discovering how modern systems are deployed and attacked.

Our educational platform features:
Security mini-CTF challenges inspired by real-world vulnerabilities.
Cloud & Engineering tasks deploying and interacting with AWS-based infrastructure.
Hands-on learning in an isolated sandbox environment with full VPN access.

Through this challenge, you’ll gain hands-on experience in Cloud, Infrastructure, and Security within a safe, sandboxed AWS environment.

We will judge your work at the end to ascertain the winners!

PRIZES:
Teams of maximum of FOUR per challenge:

Winners - £500 per person
Runners up - £250 per person

QRT has 13 global, collaborative offices.
Colleagues from multiple offices need to meet in person.
Where should the meeting be held?

Your task:
Design a tool or algorithm to identify the best host location (not necessarily an office) - balancing:
Carbon emissions from travel
Fairness in travel distance/time

We’re partnering with OAG, a global leader in travel data, providing flight schedules and CO₂ emissions data. You may also use open-source data (e.g. pricing, train times, geography) to enhance your analysis.

To see an up to date description of our challenge and access the flight dataset visit our DurHack website at https://durhack.qwerty.technology

PRIZES:
Teams of maximum of FOUR per challenge:

Winners - £500 per person
Runners up - £250 per person
Third place - £150 per person

Traditional economic data, like GDP or inflation reports, tells you where the economy was. By the time it’s released, it’s often too late. We challenge you to help us find the hidden economic signals in the noise of the digital world. Use non-traditional, high-frequency data to build a tool that tells us where the economy is going. Create an innovative way to anticipate or explain a major macroeconomic trend before the official data does.

Visualise the real-time flow of goods around the world using live shipping data to predict supply chain disruptions.
Build a ‘Real-Time Inflation Index’ by scraping prices from e-commerce websites to get ahead of central bank announcements.
Design an LLM-powered ‘Narrative Engine’ that analyses financial news or social media to measure market sentiment and predict volatility.
Create a ‘Recession Early Warning System’ by tracking job postings on sites like LinkedIn or Indeed.

Mobility & logistics: Google Mobility, MarineTraffic, FlightRadar24
Price & commerce: Web-scraped retail prices, online marketplaces, freight indices
Sentiment: Financial news APIs, Reddit, X (Twitter), GDELT, Refinitiv News Analytics
Satellite & environmental: NASA, ESA, Orbital Insight datasets
Blockchain & transaction data: On-chain volume, stablecoin flows

The winners of our challenge will each be offered a 12-month subscription to the online learning platform Udemy

Improve the world by connecting things that normally aren't.

systems // IoT devices // people // cultures

Prize: Keybow luxe all-in-one mini mechanical keyboard with customisable RGB lighting

Develop an innovative AI agent running on Arm hardware—from mobile devices to cloud servers! This challenge encourages leveraging LLMs, either on-device or via API, to create practical solutions.

Show us the best use of AI agents on Arm and win a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W kit!

Learn more at https://hackuk.org/arm

Build something over-the-top over engineered and held together with string. Use your imagination. Our favourite project will win Shark Plushes for each team member.

Google Swag Kits

It’s time to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI using Google Gemini. Check out the Gemini API to build AI-powered apps that make your friends say WHOA. So, what can Gemini do for your hackathon project?

Understand language like a human and build a chatbot that gives personalized advice

Analyze info like a supercomputer and create an app that summarizes complex research papers

Generate creative content like code, scripts, music, and more

Think of the possibilities… what will you build with the Google Gemini API this weekend?

https://mlh.link/gemini-quickstart

M5Stack Starter Kit

The world of development is evolving fast and Solana is leading the charge with a network built to handle all of your infrastructure needs. Forget high fees and slow confirmations, it’s time to build applications that are fast, efficient, and scalable.

Harness Solana's core advantages like blazing fast execution and near-zero transaction costs to make your hackathon ideas become real world projects. With Solana, the possibilities are endless.

Create a game, social app, or consumer product that relies on instant, high-frequency transactions.

Design a sophisticated trading, lending, or decentralized exchange (DEX).

Build a prototype for supply chain, identity, or payments that can handle massive, real-world volume.

Show us how you can innovate with Solana for a chance to win some cool prizes for you and each member of your team!

https://mlh.link/solana

Retro Wireless Mouse

DigitalOcean GradientTM AI is a unified AI cloud for building, training, and deploying machine learning models and AI agents. Get access to GPU infrastructure like DigitalOcean GPU Droplets and Bare Metal servers, along with serverless inference and 1-Click Models for instant deployment of your favorite LLMs!

Sign up for DigitalOcean today and get $200 worth of free credits that you can use towards building your next Gradient-powered hack. Enable your next project with DigitalOcean GradientTM AI for a chance to win some great prizes for you and each of your team mates!

http://mlh.link/digitalocean

Arduino Tiny ML Kit

Play with industry-leading LLMs on a single account using the Snowflake APIs. Adding AI capabilities into your application can be as simple as a single CURL command to Snowflake’s REST API.

Build customized applications, RAG powered chat bots, or embed AI-powered features into your app in half the time with half the hassle. Get started for free with a special, student 120-day Snowflake trial and check out this repository for an example of the Snowflake REST API in action.

https://mlh.link/snowflake

Wireless Earbuds

Deploy natural, human-sounding audio with ElevenLabs. Create realistic, dynamic, and emotionally expressive voices for any project, from interactive AI companions to narrated stories and voice-enabled apps. ElevenLabs will empower you to build rich, immersive experiences without the need for actors or complex audio production, using simply the power of AI.

Integrate fully autonomous audio experiences into your hack with ElevenLabs and give your project a voice, along with giving your team the chance to win some wireless earbuds!

https://mlh.link/elevenlabs