Hackathon 2024, and the winners are...

2024 Hackathon – “Digital Services (h)Acked” : a compétition in 2 acts !

From 03/01/2024 to 02/02/2024, the "Digital Services (h)Acked" hackathon was held, co-organized by PEReN and the European Commission (DG Connect and ECAT). Two complementary challenges took place on the theme of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the data openness obligations it imposes on digital platforms. Spotlight on the winners!

The main theme of this hackathon? Using automatic data collection and artificial intelligence, explore and exploit transparency data from digital platforms for the benefit of the scientific community and regulators.
In the run-up to the entry into force of the Digital Services Regulation (DSA) on February 17, the aim of this competition was to offer open-source innovative tools to facilitate in-depth study of the algorithms influencing our daily lives, from shopping habits to social interactions. This is crucial to understanding their impact on society and mitigating their negative effects.
Over 100 passionate, motivated and determined young talents rose to the challenge by taking part in one of the two challenges on offer. Thanks to all and congratulations to the winners!

"TRA3 – TRAnsparency-TRAcing TRAck": catalogue data
In an entirely online collaborative sprint, participants in this 1st challenge were tasked with creating tools for collecting and structuring data from publicly accessible platforms. No fewer than 1,085 web pages relating to 13 platforms were sifted through. Here are the winners

1st prize (€2,500): "Jetlime", Paul Houssel ;
2nd prize (€1,500): "gnnspap", Ioannis Papadopoulos;
3rd prize (€500): "nosch", Noam Schmitt.

"DSA RAG Race": querying data via AI
Participants from all over Europe gathered in Brussels for a one-day event. They redoubled their creativity to develop artificial intelligence, based on large language models, to provide substantiated answers to questions concerning the data made available by the platforms. Building on the tools developed during the 1st challenge, the participants also had the unique opportunity to access the resources of the Jean Zay supercomputer (IDRIS - CNRS).
The Dream Tim team (Alexandre Variengien, Charbel-Raphael Segerie, Diego Dorn) was chosen by the jury as the winner of the 2,500 euro prize.

All the tools developed during the hackathon will shortly be made available to the public via a dedicated PEReN website.

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