The ML+X community is kicking off planning for the third annual Machine Learning Marathon (MLM25)—a 12-week hackathon running from September to December 2025. Projects are drawn from research, industry, and open-source communities, and have spanned everything from time-series forecasting and NLP to medical imaging and explainable AI. Participants form teams, choose a challenge, and collaborate (virtually or in person) to develop ML/AI pipelines and evaluate different modeling strategies. Weekly sprint events feature demos, coworking time, and advisor support to help teams move forward.
Want a sense of the kinds of projects we’ve hosted before? Check out the 2024 Project (“Challenge”) Lineup, including Vein Segmentation of Infected Tomato Leaves and more!
Registration opens in August 2025
Visit this webpage again in early August to register! Available projects will be announced then. To stay updated about the 2025 ML Marathon, we recommend joining the ML+X google group. If you have any trouble joining, please email facilitator@datascience.wisc.edu.
Help Shape This Year's Event!
The Machine Learning Marathon is a community-led effort, and we’re currently inviting contributors to help shape the 2025 projects, mentoring support, and demo/talk schedule. We have four primary contributor roles available (detailed in the accordion menu below). We will have our first meeting in mid-May, and meet 2-3 times per month leading up to the event. Depending on your selected role, you may not have to attend every meeting. However, some work (e.g., sending emails) may need to be completed outside of meetings (1-2 hours/month).
If you’re interested, fill out our short interest form. Contact endemann@wisc.edu with any questions.
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Project Organizers — Got Data? Let's Build a Challenge!
Project organizers will identify good candidate projects and/or help create new open-source ML/AI projects (e.g., last year’s leaf segmentation project). We welcome contributions from across campus and local industry — as long as project content is open-source and accessible to participants (preferably posted to Kaggle).
See Kaggle’s documentation on the types of Kaggle competitions available for hosting projects. For the Machine Learning Marathon, we typically organize projects as “community” competitions since they don’t have a cost associated with them. However, some research groups may want to consider a grant-funded “research competition” to add a large prize pool to the project. However, grants are competitive, and are due by May 10th. Contact endemann@wisc.edu if you’d like further guidance on which competition type to choose. Regardless of the competition type, you’ll need:
- a clearly defined problem that competitors need to solve using a machine learning model and
- a dataset that’s used both for training and evaluating the effectiveness of these models. For example, in the Store Sales – Time Series Forecasting competition competitors must accurately predict how many of a grocery item will sell using a dataset of past product and sales information from Corporación Favorita, a large Ecuadorian-based grocery retailer.
Check Kaggle’s step by step guide on how to get started.
Presenters — Share Tools or Insights
Presenters will share ML/AI tools, workflows, or lessons during the weekly sprint events. These presentations can be live walkthroughs in Jupyter notebooks, short slide decks, or informal knowledge-sharing sessions. The goal is to make useful tools and techniques feel approachable. Past demos have included reproducible ML workflows, tips for exploratory data analysis, AWS SageMaker lessons, and more. Other demos of interest may include, but are not limited to:
- Getting started with UNET, SHAP, BERT, XGBOOST, or other popular libraries and models (e.g., short Jupyter notebook demos)
- Tips for transfer learning and finetuning
- Navigating and interpreting t-SNE, PaCMAP, and other dimensionality reduction or data viz. techniques
Advisors — Help Teams Succeed
We are looking for advisors with ML/AI experience to mentor teams (see examples of past projects for domain and method areas). Advisors are expected to attend at least 4 of the weekly sprints to assist teams (see schedule section below).
Admin — Sponsorship, Marketing, and Community Support
We’re looking for volunteers to help with general administrative support — from marketing and sponsor outreach to helping run events. If none of the other roles quite fit but you’re still excited to contribute, consider joining our group of admin volunteers!
Schedule
All times are listed in US central time. All events will also have a Zoom option for remote participants to join. All presentations and workshops ending at 7PM or later will be catered (9/11, 10/2, 10/9, 11/13, 12/11).
- Early August: Registration opens
- 9/10 (Wed), 5PM: Deadline to register
- 9/11 (Thur), 5:30-7:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Kickoff + Resources for Getting Started / Kaggle Best Practices
- 9/18 (Thur), 4:30-6:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Sprint 1 + Tips for Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
- 9/18 (Thur), 11:59PM: Deadline to form team
- 9/25 (Thur), 4:30-6:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Sprint 2 + Strategies for Reproducible ML
- 10/1 (Wed), 11:59PM: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) Slides Due
- 10/2 (Thur), 4:30-7:00PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: EDA Presentations
- 10/9 (Thur), 4:30-7:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Intro to AWS SageMaker Workshop
- 10/16 (Thur), 4:30-6:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Sprint 3 + TBA
- 10/23 (Thur), 4:30-6:30PM, Orchard View, Discovery Building: Sprint 4 + TBA
- 11/6 (Thur), 11:59PM: Progress Report Slides Due
- 11/13 (Thur), 4:30-7:00PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Draft Solution Presentations
- 11/20 (Thur), 4:30-6:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Sprint 5 + TBA
- 12/4 (Thur), 4:30-6:30PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Sprint 6 + TBA
- 12/10 (Wed), 11:59PM: Project Submissions Due
- 12/11 (Thur), 4:30-7:00PM; Orchard View, Discovery Building: Final Presentations
Interested in Sponsoring Us?
We are actively seeking sponsorships as we continue to grow and expand of our thriving community! Your generous support would play a pivotal role in enabling us to consistently deliver unparalleled value to our members through machine learning and AI workshops, hackathons, discussion forums, social gatherings, and more. Visit the sponsorship page to learn how your organization will be represented as a sponsor of ML+X.
Thank you current ML+X sponsors!
The annual Machine Learning Marathon wouldn’t be possible without support from our sponsors! ML+X is very grateful for their contributions, which help us empower ML and AI practitioners to tackle impactful projects, navigate pitfalls, share knowledge and resources, and support one another’s work. Visit the sponsorship page to learn more about sponsorship opportunities.
Learn more about our sponsors by clicking the logos below!
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Code of Conduct
In order to maintain a collaborative and friendly learning environment, all event participants and advisors are expected to adhere to the following Code of Conduct.
- Respect and Inclusivity: Encourage a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds. Avoid offensive language or comments that might make others uncomfortable.
- Active Listening: Aim to talk 20% of the time and listen the other 80%. Avoid interrupting or dominating conversations; allow others to share their thoughts.
- Ask Questions and Share Knowledge: Share your knowledge and insights generously, but in a way that is understandable to those with less experience.
- Be Patient and Supportive: Be patient with individuals who may not have as much experience.Offer assistance and mentorship when appropriate and requested.
- Mindful Communication: Explain terms that others may be less familiar with
- Feedback and Critique: Provide constructive feedback when necessary, but do so in a respectful and considerate manner. Be open to receiving feedback on your own work and ideas.
- Embrace the Kaggle Spirit! Kaggle thrives on open-source collaboration. Participants should actively contribute to the community by sharing their work, kernels, and insights.
Registration opens in August 2025
Visit this webpage again in early August to register! Available projects will be announced then. To stay updated about 2025 ML Marathon, we recommend joining the ML+X google group. If you have any trouble joining, please email facilitator@datascience.wisc.edu.
Want a sense of the kinds of projects we’ve hosted before? Check out last year’s lineup: 2024 Machine Learning Marathon