A hands-on hackathon where ENACT and three fellow Horizon Europe projects bring next-generation edge-to-cloud technologies directly into the hands of developers, students, researchers and innovators.

6–8 October 2026 Two-day coding sprint + final pitches & awards	Universitat Politècnica de València UPV · Valencia, Spain
Hackathon Hands-on engineering across the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum	Co-organized by ENACT · HYPER-AI · CoGNETs · O-CEI

ENACT is pleased to co-organize VelesHack – Riding the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum, a hands-on hackathon that will take place at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain, from 6 to 8 October 2026. Together with HYPER-AI, CoGNETs and O-CEI, ENACT will help create an intensive environment where participants can experiment with technologies shaping the future of distributed, intelligent computing.

The event brings together students, developers, researchers and technology innovators for a two-day coding sprint followed by a final day of pitches and awards. Participants will work with ready-to-use technologies, code skeletons and expert guidance, allowing them to focus on solving real engineering problems rather than spending the hackathon setting up infrastructure.

ENACT at the heart of VelesHack

For ENACT, co-organizing VelesHack is an opportunity to move beyond conventional dissemination and place the project’s Cognitive Computing Continuum (CCC) directly in the hands of the people who can test, challenge and extend it. The hackathon turns ENACT research into a practical developer experience focused on adaptive application execution across distributed infrastructures.

Participants choosing the ENACT track will explore how runtime policies can influence application performance and how workloads can dynamically adapt across Kubernetes-based environments. This connects directly with ENACT’s broader ambition to make edge-cloud systems more adaptive, intelligent and context-aware.

What participants will do

• Deploy distributed applications to live Kubernetes clusters.
• Configure runtime policies and observe how they affect application behaviour and performance.
• Experiment with dynamic adaptation across changing infrastructure and operational conditions.
• Work with developer technologies including Git, Kubernetes/Helm, Java, Python or Go, and Eclipse IDE.

Why this matters for ENACT

VelesHack creates a direct bridge between ENACT’s research results and a developer community able to validate them from a fresh perspective. The event can generate practical feedback through the exposure of participants to real continuum technologies, new implementation ideas and greater visibility for ENACT’s approach to cognitive orchestration and runtime adaptation.

Four projects. Four challenges

VelesHack is co-organized by four Horizon Europe projects whose technologies address complementary parts of the same challenge: how to make increasingly distributed computing environments more intelligent, autonomous, adaptive and trustworthy.

ENACT  •  FEATURED CHALLENGE Kubernetes Dynamic Adaptation Application Development and Runtime Performance Adaptation in the ENACT CCC. Work with runtime policies and dynamic workload adaptation across distributed Kubernetes infrastructures. What you will learn: Distributed application deployment and runtime-policy configuration for performance optimization. Skills to bring: Git, Kubernetes/Helm, Java, Python or Go, and Eclipse IDE.

HYPER-AI Agentic IDE Build Hyperion, an LLM-powered agentic assistant that enables natural-language interaction with the HYPER-AI IDE and can answer questions, control the frontend and act on files. What you will learn: Conversational AI agents, RAG, streamed Server-Sent Events (SSE) and session memory. Skills to bring: Python, Docker, and basic familiarity with LLM APIs or agentic frameworks.

COGNETS Smart Edge Resource Auctions Explore dynamic node registration and game-theory-inspired auction mechanisms for self-organizing Edge and IoT environments, building smart agents that compete for resources under realistic constraints. What you will learn: Bidding algorithms and dynamic, decentralized resource scheduling. Skills to bring: Python, Docker, REST APIs, JSON handling and basic algorithmic logic.

O-CEI Trust Ledger Traceability Design a mechanism, such as a dashboard, to inspect and search messages inserted into the Eclipse aeriOS IOTA Tangle and present trust information clearly. What you will learn: Auditing transaction streams on the IOTA Tangle and securing distributed data through encryption. Skills to bring: Software development, Git, APIs and a basic understanding of blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technologies.

Build. Collaborate. Compete.

Across the four tracks, participants will have the opportunity to build solutions with technologies developed in European research projects, exchange ideas with the teams behind them and present their results to researchers and technology pioneers. The final day will culminate in pitches and awards, turning the hackathon into both a development sprint and a showcase for new ideas.

For ENACT, VelesHack is more than an event: it is a chance to open the Cognitive Computing Continuum to hands-on experimentation, strengthen connections with developers and future technology professionals, and demonstrate how intelligent orchestration can support the next generation of distributed applications.