Real-Time Vision Challenge with XRlabs - NVIDIA x Playground x Oxford Seed Fund

Spend a Saturday building real-time AI perception for live surgery, inside the company actually doing it.

🩺 NO MEDICAL BACKGROUND NEEDED

This is a computer vision challenge, not a medical one. You don't need to know anything about surgery or medicine: if you can train and ship vision models, you're exactly who we're looking for. Engineers, ML researchers, students and builders from any field are welcome.

XRlabs builds computer vision for live operations, under some of the hardest latency and reliability constraints in the industry. It was founded by Ali Haddad, a practising neurosurgeon who left the operating theatre to fix it. For one day, their data, their stack and their engineering team are yours.

An honest look at what real-time vision costs when a surgeon is waiting. Not a demo dataset, not a toy problem.

🤖 THE CHALLENGE

Train and deploy a model that tells surgical instruments apart in live video, on NVIDIA cloud compute. You enter as an individual and build on XRlabs' synthetic surgical video, with a live leaderboard all day. The top five have their models tested on real surgical video. The task is revealed at 10:20, but you know now what you are training for.

Warm up beforehand on any open dataset if you like, and bring it with you. A head start on your tooling is fair game and expected.

DETAILS
📅 Saturday 24th October
⏰ 10:00am to 7:00pm
📍 XRlabs, London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, 100 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7AR
🏆 Prizes: £1,000 £600 £400, a Special Hardware Prize, and $100 in NVIDIA Brev credits for every participant
🤝 The hackathon is backed by Playground Global, Oxford Seed Fund and NVIDIA
🍕 Brunch, pizza, snacks and drinks on us all day
🔗 More details: surgicalxr.oxbridgeaix.uk

👥 WHO SHOULD APPLY

Computer vision enthusiasts, developers, researchers and more. Devs, builders, students and researchers across Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and beyond. Also, anyone already working at a lab or a startup. No medical or surgical experience required.

Entry is individual. Invite friends to apply too!

✍️ HOW TO APPLY
Five minutes. Your LinkedIn, a GitHub or Scholar profile, and one thing you have built, linked or shown. No qualifying task, no homework.

We review applications as they arrive and send invitations continuously, so apply early and the first people will start hearing back by Monday 12th October. Screening is done by partners XRlabs and Oxbridge AIx.

Only 20 places!

Applications close Thursday 22nd October.

A super exclusive computer vision hackathon in Europe, designed for those who want to participate in the future of surgery!

🎒 WHAT TO BRING

Your laptop
Chargers
Curious mind, no prior surgical knowledge required

Compute is provided: $100 in NVIDIA Brev credits each, so you choose your own GPU. You own your code.
IMPORTANT NOTE!
Before you're invited, you sign an NDA and a data licence: models trained on XRlabs data aren't published or commercialised, and are deleted after the event.

Brought to you by XRlabs, NVIDIA, Playground, Oxford Seed Fund and Oxbridge AIx, in partnership with OXAI, AI for Good Oxford, Oxford Entrepreneurs, Ox Founders, OxVC, Cambridge Entrepreneurs Society, BridgeFellows, and Imperial Entrepreneurs. 🚀

Questions? Email team@oxbridgeaix.uk

You've got this and We've Got Your Back!