Mentor and Judge at IEEE SmartAIthon 2026
I served IEEE SmartAIthon 2026 twice over: first as a mentor to the participating teams in August, then as a judge in the final evaluation round.
I served IEEE SmartAIthon 2026 in two rounds. On 14 August I ran a mentoring session for the participating teams, and on 22 August I came back as a judge for the final evaluation. The hackathon runs under IEEE Smart Cities and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and both panels were published on the event site.
The mentoring session was the more useful half. Most teams arrived with a working model and no idea how it would survive contact with a real deployment – where the data comes from on day two, what happens when the input distribution moves, who gets paged when the inference endpoint stops responding. Those are the questions that separate a demo from a system, and they are the same questions I ask in production reviews at work.
By the final evaluation you could see which teams had taken that on board. The strongest submissions were not the ones with the most sophisticated model. They were the ones that could explain their failure modes without being prompted.
