{"id":1873,"date":"2025-11-19T13:55:53","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T18:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tickle.utk.edu\/mse\/?p=1873"},"modified":"2025-11-19T13:55:53","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T18:55:53","slug":"hack-the-microscope-returns-with-more-global-appeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tickle.utk.edu\/mse\/hack-the-microscope-returns-with-more-global-appeal\/","title":{"rendered":"Hack the Microscope Returns with More Global Appeal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following a successful debut last year, the University of Tennessee is organizing the second edition of the hackathon for ML\/AI for microscopy.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/kaliningroup.github.io\/mic_hackathon_2\/\">Hack the Microscope 2025<\/a> will take place December 16-18. The hybrid event features in person and virtual participants at nearly 20 sites across the globe with more than $18,000 in prize money available.<\/p>\n<p>The event brings together researchers, students, and professionals to solve real microscopy problems using AI and data-driven tools. Participants will work in small interdisciplinary teams to explore imaging, spectroscopy, and automation challenges.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are really excited about the hackathon this year because last year was so successful that we raised international interest, turning the hackathon into a global event,\u201d said Austin Houston, one of the PhD student organizers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering along with Utkarsh Pratiush and Aditya Raghavan. \u201cThis alone shows how hungry the field is for bridging this gap between microscopy and computational science.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Microscopy is a primary source of information on materials structure and functionality at nanometer and atomic scales. Adoption of Data Management Plans (DMPs) by major funding agencies promotes the preservation and access to the data generated by microscopy. Deriving insights and downstream applications remains difficult, however, due to the lack of standardized code ecosystems, benchmarks, and integration strategies.\u00a0 The hackathon is designed to target this weakness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPhysics\u2014from Ptolemaian and Copernican models to Kepler laws and Newtonian mechanics\u2014was built from observing the celestial motion. Now with high resolution microscopy, we can routinely observe how atoms move and what patterns they form. However, to learn from this data requires investment in ML methods that can discover physics from these observations.\u201d said MSE Weston Fulton Professor Sergei Kalinin, the director of the hackathon. \u201cMicroscopy is not a very integrated field, and hackathons are a very strong contributor to things like code integration. It helps to build a common core ecosystem, data analytics ecosystem, and build connection to mainstream microscopy and provide some feedback with the commercial vendors.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"orange-mark\"><strong>Making UT a Hackathon Hub<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>This year\u2019s hackathon will be held at multiple locations in the United States, Europe, Singapore, Korea, Qatar, and India. The awards are sponsored by Renaissance Philanthropy, with a first prize of $10,000 and a second prize of $5,000. Multiple companies including Hugging Face, ThermoFisher, and Toyota Research Institute, have committed to support additional prizes.<\/p>\n<p>Among the US colleges take part are UT, Northwestern University, North Carolina State University, Colorado School of Mines, Johns Hopkins University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Wisconsin, and University of Colorado.<\/p>\n<p>Participants benefit by learning new and enhanced skills, increasing their visibility in the field, and networking to make them more marketable for jobs. Last year\u2019s winner was hired by Rama Vasudevan, one of the hackathon organizers and leader of the Data NanoAnalytics (DNA) Group at the Center of Nanophase Materials Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn some sense, a hackathon is almost like running a marathon,\u201d Kalinin said. \u201cTheoretically, when you run, you want to win. But for vast majority of people, the important thing is the participation. Hackathon is almost the same thing. But instead of running, you actually write code.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Given the exponential growth of Hack the Microscope in such a short time, Kalinin hopes UT can take a leading role in advancing the field through the annual event.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cUT has a rich history of ML for microscopy, starting from Professor Gerd Duscher\u2019s work in 90\u2019s. If we become the center for the machine learning for microscopy, that&#8217;s a big thing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat basically means that for machine learning and microscopy, we are the hub where this type of work is being done. We will build the bridge between the information-rich electron microscopy methods and fundamental condensed matter physics, materials science, metallurgy and manufacturing to open a new era of materials discovery and innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"orange-mark\"><strong>Contact<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Rhiannon Potkey (<a href=\"mailto:rpotkey@utk.edu\">rpotkey@utk.edu<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Follow a successful debut last year, Hack the Microscope has expanded to a worldwide event. The UT-organized competition will include participants at nearly 20 sites in the US, Europe, Korea, Singapore, Qatar, and India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[384,12],"tags":[7,9],"class_list":["post-1873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-releases","category-students","tag-ornl","tag-sergei-kalinin"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Hack the Microscope Returns with More Global Appeal - Materials Science and Engineering<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The UT-organized Hack the Microscope competition will include participants from the US, Europe, Korea, Singapore, Qatar, and India.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/tickle.utk.edu\/mse\/hack-the-microscope-returns-with-more-global-appeal\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hack the Microscope Returns with More Global Appeal - 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