[#b_hack] – Baltic Sea Region Hackathon 2025

This track focuses on creating innovative household energy consumption strategies to reduce CO2 emissions and/or cut costs. Gain access to real-time and historical data from a Smart Home (e.g., Home Assistant), including Photovoltaics (PV), Battery Storage, hourly energy spot market prices, CO2-emission data of the national German grid, and Electric Vehicles (EV). Learn how to make homes more energy-aware using open-source software and smart-home platforms. This track is for outside-the-box thinkers, nerds, energy savers, or environmental activists.

We seek solutions that are:

• Innovative: E.g., utilise PV storage in winter or use an EV as a mobile household battery to lower your CO2 footprint.
• Impactful: Reduce costs or CO2 emissions (or better, both).
• Feasible: Easily implementable with smart-home platforms like Home Assistant, with measurable effects (simulated via Jupyter Notebooks or similar).

Technical requirements and skills:

Come as you are – just bring your laptop. You should be generally interested in data-driven approaches, but there is definitely no need to be a mathematical expert.  If you master Excel, this would be sufficient. If some team members had experience with more sophisticated solutions such as Pandas or Jupyter notebooks, that would be a plus.

The goal of this session is to design a fictional city or region without borders, where innovation flows seamlessly. Participants will get to know and experiment with different methods from Design Thinking, an iterative problem-solving approach that focuses on understanding user needs, fostering creativity, and rapidly prototyping solutions.

The structure will be roughly as follows, but participants are welcome to bring their own ideas and experiences to the workshop:

1. Empathise: Brainstorming on barriers and opportunities in cross-border collaboration.
2. Define: Identifying a key problem (e.g., mobility, administration, culture).
3. Ideate: Using creativity techniques to generate ideas.
4. Prototype: Creating a visual or physical model of the borderless city (e.g. using paper, Lego, digital prototyping tools…)
5. Test: Feedback session.

Technical requirements and skills:

Come as you are – just bring your laptop.

In a borderless region, wellbeing should also have no borders. However, health services are often fragmented, difficult to access or limited to individual countries. This session is dedicated to designing a concept for a digital wellbeing platform that uses innovation to promote mental & physical health in a connected region.

Participants will develop a concept that connects cross-border health services, digital routines and community wellbeing experiences – regardless of location, culture or systems. Innovative methods such as intelligent functions or AI will also be considered.

The structure follows the design thinking approach:

1. Empathise: Exploring the challenges around wellbeing without boundaries.
2. Define: Identification of a core problem (e.g. lack of access, cultural differences, stress management).
3. Ideate: Creativity techniques to generate ideas for innovative digital solutions.
4. Prototype: Creating a visual or interactive prototype.
5. Test: Getting feedback and iterating the design.

Technical requirements and skills:

You only need your laptop and an email address. No specific technical knowledge required; focus on conceptualisation and design thinking process.

In the Baltic Sea Region, young founders, students and start-ups often work in isolated, highly fragmented networks – a problem that strongly limits the exchange of ideas, resources and opportunities. At the same time, students and regular employees are often left out, even though they have great potential for innovative collaboration.

This session focuses on designing a digital platform or App that acts as a central hub and facilitates access to co-working spaces, mentoring programmes and investors. The platform should not only serve as a pure exchange of information, but as a dynamic, interactive network that promotes intercultural and interregional dialogue and thus unleashes the innovation potential of the entire region.

The structure follows the design thinking approach:

1. Empathise: analyse the challenges and needs of the regional startup community.
2. Define: Identification of a core problem (e.g. lack of networking or information deficits).
3. Ideate: Develop creative solutions for a digital network that offers a wide range of support.
4. Prototype: Creation of a prototype that integrates central network functions such as mentoring, resource sharing and virtual events.
5. Test: Obtain feedback to refine the prototype and adapt the overall concept.

Technical requirements and skills:

You only need your laptop and an email address. No specific technical knowledge required; focus on conceptualisation and design thinking process.

Not all universities provide housing for their students. Often students rely on the local market and share accommodation. When going abroad, it becomes crucial to find accommodation at the destination. At the same time, students need to find someone to take over their room at the home university for the duration of their stay abroad. The task for this track is simple: Solve the accommodation problem for exchange students.

Tasks:

• Determine requirements for a platform for pairing outgoing and incoming students and discuss other approaches for solving the accommodation problem,
• Implement a prototype

Technical requirements and skills:

Laptop. Programming / Software Development

Artificial Intelligence will overtake our planet and impact our precious lives (Source: trust me, bro). Today, we need to get ready to defend our privacy, our secrets, our data, and thus our lives. Under all circumstances, AI needs to be kept at bay. AI already screws our planet, by using up valuable resources. For instance, a typical data center uses up 0.9 megatons of clean groundwater just for cooling and 100 million kWh energy per year. No worries, we have a solution: EdgeAI! Running controlled models on a microcontroller enables us ultimate control over our data while it is resource-saving.

Tasks:

• Sketch out the problem and provide conceptual solutions (think-tank style!)
• Develop a prototype to showcase solutions on EdgeAI hardware (engineering style!)

Technical requirements and skills:

Laptop. Critical minds

This session involves the creation of an interactive map to illustrate how climate change is affecting the Baltic Sea Region. The tool allows users to explore dynamic and engaging visualisations of key climate risks such as flooding, heat stress, coastal erosion and sea level rise. It helps to understand how climate change affects different parts of the Baltic region. It also supports planning and activism based on facts and encourages countries to talk to each other about environmental challenges.

Tasks:

• Develop an interactive map with zoom and explore functionality 
• Visualise climate risks data 
• Visualise local activities and call for action on the map

Technical requirements and skills:

Laptop. Programming and GIS skills will be beneficial.