Eighty-nine teams, comprising more than 300 students from universities across the Netherlands, working together for six weeks on a relevant social issue. Their winning solution will actually be presented to TNO. The first edition of the AI Cup demonstrates that the Netherlands is rich in AI talent.
AIC4NL is organizing the competition in collaboration with Team Epoch, the AI team from TU Delft. We spoke with Natalie Halaskova from Team Epoch.
For and by students
The participating teams are made up of students from different universities, which is rare in higher education. Natalie explains: “Most teams include students from different universities. At many hackathons, you do meet people from other universities, but you don’t work together. Moreover, those last one day, three at most. The fact that this was a six-week hackathon forced people to collaborate intensively, and that is very valuable.”
Image: Natalie Halaskova of Team Epoch
The organization itself is made up of students, she explains. “It’s not a big company like ING that organizes a lot of these hackathons. It’s organized by students—by us. It’s truly a community-driven competition.”
Solving areal-world problem
Students were given the opportunity to tackle a real-world social problem, using a dataset provided by TNO. The issue: migratory birds that die in large numbers every year in wind farms. To prevent this, the turbines must be shut down regularly, at the expense of renewable energy production. Natalie explains the choice: “We were looking for a topic with real-world impact. There are AI challenges that predict whether people watch more soccer or hockey. That’s fun too, but it doesn’t really affect people or our environment. We felt that this was an important problem we could help solve.”
Surprising insights
The competition produced technically robust AI models, but there were also some unexpected bonuses. Natalie: “There were some nice surprises. Like the dataset: it already contained ten bird characteristics. Using weather data, participants derived about three hundred new ones from it: parameters such as acceleration, relative or compensated airspeed, behavior during different moon phases, or whether a bird is circling or flying a directed course. That’s a double win: we build an AI model and collect biological data.”
Giving talent opportunities
The AI Cup gives a boost to the talent that will shape the future of AI. Students work on real-world problems using real data and connect with researchers and organizations that will be of value to them. For Natalie, that is exactly the goal: “The AI Cup is a way to train the next generation of engineers. And it also inspires students for whom AI is still uncharted territory.”
From the Netherlands to Europe
Their ambitions extend beyond this edition. “This was the first time, and it went really well. We’d now like to organize an international, European AI competition.” Whereas students from different Dutch universities are currently working together as a single team, students from different countries will soon be doing the same. “We want to create a space where people can share their passion for AI and grow as a community,” Natalie concludes.
AIC4NL will announce the winner of the AI Cup during the Dutch AI Congress 2026, on April 14 at DeFabrique in Utrecht.
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