Huawei Ireland’s Derek Collins discusses the Tech Arena 2026 hackathon, and why this year’s challenge revolves around recommendation systems.

Every year, Huawei Ireland Research Centre hosts a student-focused hackathon called Tech Arena, where students from across Ireland gather to tackle a real-world challenge relating to the tech industry.

Huawei Ireland recently opened registrations for this year’s event, inviting students to form teams of three to eight members to explore the AI-focused topic of “generative sequential recommendation under constraints”.

“In practical terms, that means developing intelligent recommendation approaches that can learn from users’ previous interactions, anticipate what they may want next and make effective recommendations in a changing, competitive environment,” explains Derek Collins, director of industry engagement and research collaboration at Huawei Ireland.

Collins – who leads Huawei Ireland’s research collaboration and industry engagement efforts – tells SiliconRepublic.com that the goal of Tech Arena is to give students an opportunity to apply advanced AI and machine-learning concepts to a complex problem that reflects challenges faced by modern digital platforms.

“Recommendation systems are now central to how people discover products, content and services. The challenge is no longer simply to recommend something relevant; systems also need to operate efficiently, respond to changing user behaviour and make decisions within real-world computational constraints,” he says.

“Through Tech Arena, we want students to think about AI not just as a theoretical discipline, but as something that needs to work effectively in a dynamic environment.”

Another objective of Tech Arena, according to Collins, is “developing the next generation of AI talent in Ireland”.

“Participants can collaborate with other students, engage with technology professionals, showcase their capabilities and gain experience of taking an idea from a technical challenge through to a working solution and presentation.”

As well as that, competition finalists will also have an opportunity to interview with Huawei’s Irish Research Centre for intern positions.

The challenge for this year’s Tech Arena is officially titled ‘Competing in the Intelligent Marketplace: Generative Sequential Recommendation Under Constraints’.

According to Collins, the challenge provides students with an opportunity to work on a problem that connects academic concepts with the kinds of considerations that arise when AI systems are deployed in real environments.

He explains that at its core, the challenge “concerns how an AI system can use a history of user interactions to generate recommendations and anticipate future behaviour”.

The word “sequential” is important, he says.

“Rather than treating every recommendation as an isolated decision, teams need to consider how previous interactions provide signals about what might happen next. A recommendation can itself influence subsequent behaviour, so the system needs to operate within an evolving feedback loop.”

In tackling the challenge, teams must consider a number of extra elements related to the problem, such as how the system strategy performs in a changing marketplace, and how to balance system quality with compute and runtime constraints.

Collins says that this topic was chosen for Tech Arena 2026 because “recommendation technology is increasingly important to how people interact with digital products and services”.

“But building an effective recommendation system is a much more complex problem than simply predicting what a user might like,” he says.

“User behaviour changes. Recommendations influence subsequent interactions. Computational resources are finite. And systems need to remain responsive while processing large amounts of behavioural information.

“That combination creates an interesting research and engineering problem for students because it brings together areas such as AI, machine learning, sequential decision-making, generative models and optimisation.”

‘Test assumptions rather than simply adding complexity’

The Tech Arena event has multiple stages, beginning with registration, which is open until 30 October. Teams are then selected, with the top 15 teams being announced on 9 November.

The competition culminates with an on-site hackathon in Dublin on 14 and 15 November. The hackathon concludes with an award ceremony, where the winners of third-, second- and first-place prizes will be announced, all taking home a portion of a total prize fund of €15,500 – with the first-place team receiving €6,000.

While the prize money is an attractive element, Collins says there is much more to the event than just the competition itself.

Participants will get the opportunity to work collaboratively, develop their problem-solving skills and turn their ideas into a prototype or working approach, he explains. They will also get the chance to present their work to industry experts and tech leaders, and avail of plenty of networking opportunities, with students from around the country getting a chance to meet people with similar interests and “potentially creating relationships and future collaborations”.

“There is also a learning element through workshops and interaction with professionals working in technology and AI,” says Collins. “For students considering careers in areas such as machine learning, data science, software engineering or AI research, that exposure can be particularly valuable.”

Collins explains that the event also has a “recruitment dimension”, as students will be provided with an opportunity to engage with the wider technology ecosystem and “demonstrate what they can do beyond what appears on a CV”.

For someone who’s considering applying for the event, Collins has a bit of advice.

“Start thinking about the problem early and build a complementary team!”

He explains that the challenge is broad enough that different skills can be valuable. “Someone with a strong machine-learning background might approach the problem differently from someone with expertise in software engineering, data analysis or optimisation,” he says.

“A team that combines those perspectives can bring more depth to its solution.”

He also encourages students not to focus exclusively on building the “most complicated model”.

“A sophisticated approach is not necessarily useful if it cannot operate efficiently,” says Collins. “Think carefully about the problem you are trying to solve, understand the data and constraints, establish a strong baseline, and then iterate. Test assumptions rather than simply adding complexity.”

Finally, Collins says participants should make sure to take advantage of the wider experience of the event by talking to other students, engaging with the experts and ensuring you’re prepared to explain not only what your system does, “but why you designed it that way and what trade-offs you made”.

“The strongest learning opportunity may come from the process of tackling a difficult problem as a team – not simply from the final result.”

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