Resolving Optical Path
OPTICA EGYPT // CALIBRATING
Resolving Optical Path
OPTICA EGYPT // CALIBRATING
Competitive Technical Programs
Egypt's premier competitive hackathon to develop open-source design automation tools, simulation accelerators, and machine learning models for optics and photonics.
2026 Edition · Build Software Tools and AI Models for Photonics
The Software-Defined Photonics Hackathon brings together undergraduate engineers, graduate researchers, and software developers across Egypt. Teams build production-ready Python tools, train inverse-design neural networks, and curate open photonic benchmarks that empower the global optics community.
Hybrid (Virtual Build Sprint and In-Person Finale)
1 to 4 Members
Open Source (Apache 2.0 / MIT / BSD)
November 2026
Challenge Architecture
Select the track matching your skills. Whether writing Python automation scripts, training neural surrogates, or curating benchmark datasets, every project advances open-access optics.
Build open-source Python libraries, layout automation scripts, GDSII and OASIS DRC utilities, or electromagnetic solver acceleration packages.
Develop deep learning surrogates, inverse-design neural networks, or physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to predict or optimize optical device behavior.
Curate and publish labeled datasets of simulated or experimentally measured photonic components to establish global community benchmarks.
Create plugins, converters, or workflow adapters linking standalone tools like gdsfactory, Meep, and EDA suites into unified design pipelines.
Hackathon Roadmap
A structured championship designed with weekly check-ins, mentor office hours, and peer feedback to take projects from concept to documented open-source release.
Every registered team is paired with an academic researcher or industry engineer specializing in Python PDA tooling, numerical simulation, or machine learning for optics.
All submissions are hosted on GitHub under community-friendly open licenses, ensuring winning tools directly benefit students, research labs, and startups across Egypt.
Teams register, select their challenge track, access starter repositories, and attend technical onboarding masterclasses.
Intensive development sprint with weekly check-ins and dedicated mentorship sessions with academic and industry experts.
Teams submit public GitHub repositories with clean documentation, unit tests, and reproducible Jupyter demonstration notebooks.
Finalist teams present live demos to an independent technical jury. Winners receive cash prizes, compute credits, and conference travel grants.
Scoring Standard
Entries are scored by a technical jury comprising university professors, research fellows, and photonic layout engineers.
Novelty of the computational approach, algorithmic efficiency, and sophistication of photonics modeling.
Readable, modular codebase with comprehensive docstrings, unit tests, and accessible getting-started tutorials.
Practical usefulness of the tool or model for researchers, students, and engineers in the photonics ecosystem.
Clear benchmark comparisons against established analytical formulas or numerical simulation ground truth.
Honors and Prizes
Recognizing excellence with cash prizes, travel subsidies, and direct integration into the national open-source photonics stack.
Priority integration into Optica Egypt open toolstack and cloud compute credits.
Direct mentorship pairing with international research laboratories.
Optica membership sponsorship and official publication recognition.
National Competition Arena
Complementing the Software-Defined Hackathon with physical silicon tapeouts and national academic thesis awards.
Annual nationwide PIC layout competition where university teams submit DRC-clean silicon designs for subsidized multi-project wafer (MPW) fabrication.
Annual nationwide merit distinction and cash honors recognizing outstanding bachelor graduation capstones, master theses, and Ph.D. dissertations.