Brain Lab to Sponsor Datathon Track at IUT 12th ICT FEST 2026

Gazipur, 8 July 2026 — Brain Lab, the research and experimentation wing of the EBLICT Project under the Bangladesh Computer Council, ICT Division, is sponsoring the Datathon competition at IUT 12th ICT FEST, the annual technology festival organized by the IUT Computer Society at the Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Gazipur.

This year's Datathon carries the theme অলীকবচন — a Bengali LLM Hallucination Detection Challenge, in which student teams build systems that identify hallucinated or factually unreliable outputs from large language models, and defend their methodology through notebooks, code, written reports, and an onsite presentation to judges.

The Datathon is open to teams of one to four members from any department and any university, including cross-university teams, with registration open to first-year through fourth-year students for a fee of 600 BDT per team. Registration unfolded in two phases: Phase I ran from 19 to 30 June, followed by Phase II from 1 to 15 July, allowing new teams to join even after the preliminary round began on 1 July.

The preliminary round runs through 20 July, with paper and code submissions due on 21 July. Finalist teams will be announced on 23 July, ahead of the onsite final defense at the IUT campus from 10 AM to 3 PM on 25 July. The Datathon carries a dedicated prize pool of 120,000 BDT distributed across the top five teams.

The Datathon is one of six competitive tracks at IUT 12th ICT FEST, alongside the IUPC programming contest, an Agentic AI Hackathon, Game Jam, and FIFA and Valorant esports tournaments, together carrying a combined prize pool of over 550,000 BDT. The festival's onsite finals take place at the IUT campus on 24–25 July 2026, with a valid student ID required for participation.

Brain Lab's sponsorship of the Datathon reflects its broader public-interest mandate to support research and applied work on Bengali language technology, including low-resource NLP, model evaluation, and responsible AI — extending that mission beyond its own labs to student communities across Bangladesh.