Flower AI Summit 2026·April 15–16·London
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Quickstart for the Decentralized AI Hackathon

ByJavier Fernandez, Pan Heng, Yan Gao, Robert Steiner
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Just two days to go until the Decentralized AI Hackathon at Stanford! 🚀 If you're getting ready to join, this post gives you a quick overview of what to expect.

What's the Hackathon About?

The hackathon brings together brilliant minds from academia, industry, and the open-source community to explore the future of decentralized AI. Expect to see work on:

  • Distributed and federated learning
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies
  • Cutting-edge decentralized AI applications

Most importantly, it's a chance to learn, collaborate, and have fun! Whether you're brand new to decentralized AI or an experienced practitioner, this blog post will link you to the correct resources you need to hit the ground running and win the prizes.

Three Tracks

You'll have the opportunity to work on one (or more) of the following tracks:

  • Track 1: The Builder — Decentralized AI for Healthcare

    Explore medical data with MedMNIST and improve existing models. You'll also gain access to the Flower ResearchGrid to run your experiments.

  • Track 2: The Challenger — Open-Ended Challenges

    Already have something in mind? This track allows you to take on ambitious, open-ended problems, or propose new ones, without limitation. Use Flower to implement your solution on any dataset you like, including your own. We can't wait to see your creativity in action!

  • Track 3: The Contributor — Advancing Flower Open Source

    Flower thrives thanks to its open-source community. Choose from a curated list of contribution tasks, work on it during the hackathon, and open a PR to Flower's main repository. We look forward to seeing your name on the contributors list by the end of the event!

Prizes are open to all tracks, so you're free to choose whichever track excites you most. You'll also need to build a demo and present it to the judges at 6:30 PM.

Who's joining?

The hackathon will bring together students and researchers from top institutions including Stanford, San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and NYU. They'll be joined by professionals from leading tech companies such as Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, IBM, and many more.

Prizes

Yes, there will be prizes!

  • 8x Raspberry Pi cluster
  • 4x Raspberry Pi cluster
  • 2x AMD GPUs
  • 2x Raspberry Pis

Sponsored by AMD

This event is proudly sponsored by AMD, whose cutting-edge hardware powers much of today's AI research and innovation.

Full Guide

You'll find the complete hackathon guide on Flower Discuss.

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