While in the first round of the competition series called AI Idea Competition, participants presented their innovative AI concepts and ideas, the recently held second round focused specifically on developments that are already functional or pretty much advanced. The DEIK.AI Challenge 2026 competition was organized by the Faculty of Informatics with support from Innovation Ecosystem Centre and KER Debrecen Nonprofit Kft.
The total number of entries submitted for the demo competition was thirty-nine, out of which twenty-one projects were invited to the in-person presentation stage. Here, the contestants were required not only to discuss their plans but also to demonstrate their systems in action. Thus, this event provided professional feedback to the developers on the one hand, while on the other hand, it gave the university feedback about which AI fields interest the students most, what development skills the students currently possess, and where further training and mentoring opportunities should be established.
There were three categories for the participants to compete in. The “Open AI Project” category was open for entries featuring any self-developed AI solution. The “Urban Environmental Monitoring” category was linked to the “Green Sentry” environmental monitoring system of Debrecen and its associated data, while the “AI-Assisted PR Content Generation” category called for the development of systems capable of generating communication content from scientific, research or educational source materials.
András Hajdu, Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Debrecen, underlined that, at the demo competition, the expectation was to see actual implementations of applications, and a good concept or its presentation alone was not sufficient.
- What we want to see is which developments have the potential to become marketable products, solutions applicable in research or the basis for further university collaborations. Another objective of equal importance is to strengthen multidisciplinary ties between the individual faculties and to help students showcase their best projects at international competitions and professional forums at a later stage. At the same time, this competition also constitutes valuable feedback for us, showing which students would be open to tackling even more serious AI development tasks. In the long run, our aim is to establish a community of student developers out of which we can recruit talent for educational, R&D, and even university administrative AI projects. Therefore, we do not want an idea to simply reach its conclusion at the end of the competition, but rather to open up channels for the strongest developments and developers to progress further-said the faculty leader.
In the end, the Open AI Project competition was won jointly by Praetor and RoarFit, while Flowcut finished third. In the AI-Assisted PR Content Generation category, CiteFlow came first, followed by BeyondPaper as second and Present My Document as third. The Urban Environmental Monitoring category was won by GreenMind, while GreenSense Debrecen took the second place.
The best developments of the demo competition are automatically invited to the final event of a two-day AI Sprint, scheduled to be held on October 9–10. In this third round, the participating teams will be expected to rapidly refine their solutions and develop new features. At this stage, beside evaluating teamwork, individual skills and initiatives are also going to be adjudicated. During the course of the sprint, the overall objective is to determine which projects and developers can advance the fastest under intense development conditions and which initiatives hold real potential for continuation in research, business or international competitive environments.
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