May 4-6, 2026 | Hofgeismar
Organizers: Luisa Drescher, Juliette Vivien, Arian Memarpouri
What is the ReTune Hackathon?
The annual ReTune Hackathon is an intensive and collaborative event to address a spectrum of scientific coding problems. During the Hackathon, the participants chose a team and worked on a specific project for 3 days. The projects were selected to address software problems shared across multiple domains within the SFb. This collaborative synergy fostered effective troubleshooting and set the stage for further collaborative initiatives.
What happened?
Bootcamp:
The Hackathon kicked off with an intensive Python bootcamp by Atle Eskeland Rimehaug from iBOTs. Especially for new students covering Python fundamentals, virtual environments and GitHub workflows, this was a great opportunity to get familiar with coding.
Keynote:
We were delighted to welcome Alexandre Gramfort for our keynote lecture. His talk on decoding of surface EMG (close to what has been published in: A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction) was followed by an engaging Q&A. Gramfort, whose work many of you might know from tools such as MNE and scikit-learn, works at the interface of neuroscience, machine learning, signal processing and open-source scientific software.
What collaborations or projects came from it?
During these days, the team worked on three main projects:
- Perceive Toolbox : the team continued the development of a published MATLAB toolbox for reading and working with Percept data
- PyPerceive: the team created a further development of the Python equivalent
- A project inspired by BCI Competition IV, focused on decoding finger flexion movements from ECoG data. For this last challenge, the team developed a decoding pipeline combining spectral and temporal features with a Ridge regression model to predict finger movements from neural signals.
Apart from the technical results, the event sparked new collaborations and strengthened existing ones. Many participants continued refining their tools and sharing their expertise after the Hackathon, demonstrating how three focused days can jump-start long-term connections.
