High school, undergraduate and graduate students competed over 24 hours to analyze news trends, forecast future cycles, and more
WASHINGTON , DC, UNITED STATES, March 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Students from across Brno, Czechia spent 24 hours turning raw news data from Newsmatics into creative visual presentations, sacrificing sleep to compete in the annual hackathon to win cash prizes.
The competition pushed students with IT and data analysis skills to think like journalists and investigators, analyzing historical news trends, predicting future news cycles, and exploring ways to combat misinformation.
This year’s hackathon, held Feb. 27-28, was streamed live on YouTube, giving audiences around the world a chance to witness the competition in real time. Highlights from the event also appeared on popular social media news pages in Czechia and were featured in Czech TV news coverage.
All 11 teams produced impressive projects, according to Newsmatics executives. Students gathered in the KYPO conference room at the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University, where they worked to transform complex data into visual news stories.
“I am really glad that all teams successfully completed this year’s hackathon,” said Jakub Leps, chief content officer of Newsmatics.
“What’s more, our jury, which was composed of the same members as last year, considered this year’s projects to be even more successful than last year’s.”
Each team selected a project from several topics, including fake news detection, forecasting news trends, and developing tools that could assist investigative journalists.
The first-place winning team took home the ultimate prize of 25,000 CZK for their PolyTics project, which uses data from Polymarket and the Newsmatics News Index to help users understand the context of different events more easily.
Team members from the winning team, “Radek 12,” were Oskar Klíma, Anna Hronová, Tomáš Halmazňa, Štěpán Husa, led by David Halmazňa.
“The members of the winning team, Radek 12, managed to prepare an excellent project combining publicly available predictions of various events with our data and, with the help of dynamic graphs, convincingly illustrated the shifts in the probabilities of these predictions,” Leps said. “They also gave an effective presentation in the form of mutual interviews within the team, and the jury had no doubts about the winner of this year’s hackathon.”
Coming in second place, “Spaghetti Coders Reborn” developed an AI‑powered debate preparation tool that helps users craft winning strategies by combining opponent research, real‑time news intelligence, and LLM‑generated argumentation.
And the third‑place team, “Stack Underflow,” designed a tool to analyze when a theme begins to emerge, how often it appears over time, and to run a causality analysis to identify the events or factors that triggered its emergence.
Meanwhile, this marked the second Hackathon hosted by Newsmatics, an AI-powered news intelligence and Data-as-a-Service company, which is already in discussions about another event next year.
Overall, a total of 44 participants, including high school, undergraduate and graduate students, took part in the fully booked event. The teams presented their projects before a panel of judges, who selected the winners and recognized several honorable mentions.
A wide range of skills were on display during the 2026 Hackathon, from teamwork and creativity to technical excellence, in an atmosphere of fun, innovation and learning.
Newsmatics extended a sincere thanks to the Faculty of Informatics and KYPO, Faculty of Informatics, at Masaryk University, for their invaluable support of the recent Hackathon event. Their collaboration was instrumental in the event’s success.
Visit the event website for more details about the projects, photos and more.
ABOUT NEWSMATICS
Newsmatics Inc. is an independent privately held news tech company headquartered in Washington, D.C., focused on news technology platform development. Its activities include media monitoring, custom media analysis, and advanced intelligence software applications. Its product line includes EIN Presswire, Affinity Group Publishing, Newsmatics News Index, and Perspectify, among others. Newsmatics’ workforce consists of a global network of talented individuals focused on providing clarity and increasing transparency with respect to news content, while simultaneously striving to help fill local news deserts. To learn more about Newsmatics, go to newsmatics.com.
Jakub Leps
Newsmatics Inc.
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