Young people working
Munich neuromorphic hackathon

fortiss - TUM Klinikum: Neuromorphic Brain-Computer Interface

Munich Neuromorphic Hackathon

The Munich Neuromorphic Hackathon offers an intensive week of hands-on work with neuromorphic hardware and spiking neural networks. The focus is on addressing real industrial use cases provided by companies and the research institute fortiss. Students work on these challenges in small teams, supported by experienced mentors from research and industry.

The event takes place in the inspiring environment of the Highlight Towers in Munich—with views over the Alps and an open, creative working atmosphere. The goal is to showcase the potential of neuromorphic technologies in industrial applications and to demonstrate their applicability beyond academic scenarios.

Focus areas of the hackathon:

  • Addressing current industrial challenges in fields such as object recognition, robotic control, audio processing, pose estimation, and more
  • Access to neuromorphic hardware and tools
  • Professional support from the Neuromorphic Computing teams of fortiss and NeuroTUM
  • Opportunity for scientific further development of results through joint publications
  • Long-term continuation of selected topics beyond the hackathon

The Munich Neuromorphic Hackathon combines technical innovation with real industrial requirements while fostering exchange between students, researchers, and companies. The event contributes to the development of a vibrant neuromorphic ecosystem and offers students a practical introduction to applied research and development.

The event serves as a starting point for further work. Selected topics are continued in a reduced format after the hackathon and, in some cases, scientifically deepened in collaboration with the participating companies and fortiss—up to joint publications. This creates an initial access point to applied research and advanced industrial projects.

Hackathon 2026

What to expect

The participating companies and topics for this year include:

  • Neura Robotics: Neuromorphic motor-reflex application
  • DLR: Neuromorphic Space Situational Awareness
  • fortiss-TUM Klinikum: Neuromorphic Brain-Computer Interface
  • OpenHardware: TinyML on FPGA
  • Neurobus: Neuromorphic counter-UAS drone detection
  • OHB Hellas: Drone flight on Akida hardware
  • Innatera: noch offen
  • Airbus: Neuromorphic detection of propeller icing
When

October 5–9, 2026
 

Where

fortiss Labs (3rd floor)
Guerickestr. 25 
80805 Munich


Application

Apply now via the official  4th Munich Neuromorphic Hackathon | neuroTUM

Target Audience

The hackathon is aimed at students interested in neuromorphic computing and offers the opportunity to work on real industrial problems using cutting-edge technologies.


Program

Check out the program here.

Past Hackathons

Students during 2025 hackathon

2025 edition

Topics: Event-based Gait Recognition with Simi GmbH, Anomaly Detection in Satellite Communication with ESA and Even-based Drone Tracking with DLR.

Groupphoto of 2024 hackathon

2024 edition

Topics: -> Satellite pose estimation -> Real time depth sensing and tracking -> Using time to first spike for sparse spike encoding

Students during 2024 hackathon

2024 edition

The 2024 edition included 16 students and two companies—IBM Research and Neurobus.

Groupphoto of 2023 hackathon

2023 edition

Topics: -> Temporal pattern recognition with resonator networks and Hebbian learning -> STDP based unsupervised learning of visual feature to detect orientation of tracked objects -> Continual learning of gesture prototypes -> Dynamic fields for robotic arm control

Students during 2023 hackathon

2023 edition

Fifteen students, the company Intel, as well as the teams from fortiss Neuromorphic Computing and NeuroTUM participated, contributing as mentors and organizers.

ECCV 2024 paper from the 2023 hackathon project

Export list as BibTeX file

  • October 2024 Scaling Up Resonate-and-Fire Networks for Fast Deep Learning Thomas Huber , Jules Lecomte , Borislav Polovnikov and Axel von Arnim In Computer Vision - ECCV 2024, volume 15059 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, October 2024. Details URL DOI BIB

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