AI4Science Hackathon @ Merantix AI Berlin

Build an autonomous AI agent that can do science — without knowing in advance what science it will be doing.
This is an autoresearch hackathon. Each team designs a system — agent scaffold, prompting strategy, tool-use pipeline, or any combination — capable of autonomously tackling data-driven scientific problems. You won't be solving the problems yourself. Your agent will.
How it works
We provide a set of development problems: real scientific tasks with known solutions, drawn from experimental and observational datasets. Use them however you like: study the task format, run your agent against them, evaluate its outputs, iterate on your design.
Final submissions are scored on a set of hidden test problems no team has seen. Same format, different tasks. Your agent runs fully autonomously during evaluation, no prompts, no nudges, no human in the loop.
What we're testing
Can your agent generalize across scientific domains? Can it load unfamiliar data, form an approach, execute the analysis, and produce meaningful results entirely on its own? That's autoresearch and that's what we want to see.
Problem categories
Tasks are drawn from three domains:
Materials
Science of AI / ML
Bio
Teams can specialize their agent for a single domain or enter the General Science super-category, where the same agent is run against test problems from all three domains at once.
Program
1:30 PM - Doors open and check-in at Merantix AI Campus
1:45 PM - Hack kick-off and track intro
2:00 PM - 10 min pairing session
2:10 PM - Hacking begins
6:00 PM - Pizza & networking
7:00 PM - Winners announcement & showcase
8:00 PM - Networking

This event is part of Deep Tech Week. Create a free profile at deep-tech-week.com/register to help hosts approve your registration and build your schedule for the week.

About your hosts
Merantix AI Campus: In the heart of Berlin, the Campus is home to 80+ AI teams and hosts 300+ events a year. Part of Merantix, driving Europe’s AI future since 2016, the Campus is where the brightest and most ambitious founders, operators, engineers, industry leaders, and investors come together to shape next-generation AI infrastructure and applications across industries.
CuspAI is a frontier AI company on a mission to solve the breakthrough materials needed to power human progress. The team at Cusp designs climate-focused materials for carbon capture, clean energy, and sustainable industrial applications.

Dunia Innovations is redefining how the world discovers new materials. By closing the “simulation-to-reality” gap, Dunia’s AI-driven autonomous lab, IRIS, fuses robotics, real-world data, and multi-modal learning to accelerate the design of next-generation materials. From energy to chemicals to advanced manufacturing, Dunia is building the discovery engine for a sustainable, abundant future.
Tiptree Systems is an AI company on a mission to accelerate science by reimagining how researchers and AI collaborate. Their AI scientific coordinator, Althea, routes knowledge and opportunities to the right people, so that breakthroughs don’t get left on the table.