4 Braincells Finish 4th at CISPA European Cybersecurity & AI Hackathon Championship
Four members of our Machine Learning and Data Mining (MLDM) team – Tanja Šarčević, Yelyzaveta Klysa, Sabina Khazari, and Daryna Oliynyk – competed as team “4 braincells” in the Grand Finale of the CISPA European Cybersecurity & AI Hackathon Championship, finishing an impressive 4th place.
The team had previously qualified through the Vienna regional round, where they placed second among 16 participating teams. In the Grand Finale in Saarbrücken, they faced 16 other regional winners from across Europe.
The competition focused on challenging machine learning security problems. The three final tasks covered text watermark localization, targeted image misclassification attacks, and the reconstruction of face images from model gradients. The team performed particularly strongly on the targeted misclassification task, reaching first place on the leaderboard at one point during the competition.
After the technical challenges, the teams ranked in the top six advanced to a presentation round, where “4 braincells” ultimately secured 4th place overall.
© Daryna Oliynyk, CISPA
For the four researchers, the hackathon was an opportunity to put their expertise in machine learning security to the test under intense competition, and to collaborate as a team on some genuinely challenging problems. Their result is a great achievement and highlights the strength of the MLDM team and its expertise at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.
Congratulations to Tanja, Yelyzaveta, Sabina, and Daryna on this fantastic result!