The Data4Good Festival empowers Europe’s brightest young minds to use data science and AI to tackle pressing global issues: from migration to climate change, from social equity to democratic innovation.
Together, we’re building a future where data serves the common good.
About the Data4Good Festival
The Data4Good Festival is an annual 3-day event at the Hertie School aimed at empowering the next generation of young scientists and innovators to tackle pressing societal challenges using data-driven solutions.
Bringing together bachelor's students from across Europe, the festival fosters creativity, collaboration, and impactful innovations that benefit the common good.
To date, it is the only hackathon and data event in Europe exclusively for bachelor’s students, with generous scholarship support.
Talks and workshops led by data experts
We enrich the learning experience of the festival with expert workshops and talks on data science skills and research. In 2024, we had tutorials on coding with AI (Copilot), network science, data in the public sector, Tableau visualisation and creating GPT models.
Hackathon for the social good
The core of the Data4Good Festival is a hackathon where students tackle real-world challenges using data-driven approaches. This hands-on experience will focus on enhancing students' technical skills by working on real datasets. Students can win cash prizes, swag bags, access to premium data science learning resources among other awards.
Social games and networking
Students also get to enjoy social games night and other networking opportunities with fellow participants and workshop experts to learn and establish new friendships and mentorship.
Challenge 1: Harnessing Open Data for Municipal Innovation
In collaboration with Technologiestiftung/CityLab Berlin, we presented a challenge that dives into the diverse and rich datasets capturing the essence of urban life in Berlin and encouraged students to use data science methods to uncover insights and develop solutions that address the multifaceted challenges of urban living
Challenge 2: The Missing Migrant Project
In collaboration with International Organization for Migration (IOM), we introduced a hackathon challenge centered on the pressing issue of international migration with a dataset that provides vital statistics on missing migrants worldwide, capturing the urgency and human aspects of migration issues.
The first-place award for Technical Excellence went to the team ETHical from ETH Zurich, which included Simon Storf, Adam Suma, Alexander Brady, Igor Torshin, and Ajit Mistry. Their project created an interactive analysis dashboard that showcases pollution concentration across Berlin, highlighting problematic areas and utilising scraped Wikipedia articles with large language models to offer explanation and potential solutions to reduce emissions.
The first-place award for Social Impact went to DataWave Bodensee from the University of Constance, which included Niklas Kessler, Marina Hauger, Friederike Körte, Philipp Traber, and Martin Tran. Their project created an AI-driven media monitoring tool that gathers and automatically summarises online news sources on potential missing migrant incidents using large language models.
The first-place award went to Forward College Haxtrordinaries from Forward College, which included Louisa Horras, Isaac Velez, Nicolette Setty, Giulia Rosa, and Victoria Lorenza Northe. Their presentation featured a data-based story of the harsh journey that many migrants have to endure to reach their destination, spotlighting the many different types of risks and potential solutions that can help to mitigate them
