Kharagpur, India:
The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur has announced DataQuest 2026, a national-level online hackathon focused on artificial intelligence and data-driven system design. The competition is being organised under Megalith 2026, IIT Kharagpur’s annual civil engineering technical fest, and is sponsored by Pathway, a leading real-time data processing and streaming platform.

The event aims to provide students across India with hands-on exposure to modern AI system architectures, particularly Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, which are increasingly adopted in industry for building intelligent, context-aware applications.

Focus on Real-World AI Systems

Unlike conventional data science competitions that emphasize isolated model performance, DataQuest 2026 places strong emphasis on end-to-end system design. Participants are expected to design and implement AI solutions capable of retrieving relevant information and generating accurate, context-aware responses using modern machine learning techniques.

The problem statement, available on the official competition platform, is inspired by real-world use cases and encourages participants to think beyond algorithms and focus on scalable, production-ready AI systems.

Pathway Named as Event Sponsor

Pathway has been announced as the official Event Sponsor of DataQuest 2026. Its real-time data engine forms the technological backbone of the challenge, enabling participants to work with streaming data, incremental computation, and modern AI workflows.

The collaboration allows participants to gain hands-on exposure to tools and architectures that are actively used in industry. As part of the registration process, teams are required to engage with Pathway’s open-source ecosystem.

All team members must star the following GitHub repositories during registration:

• https://github.com/pathwaycom/llm-app

• https://github.com/pathwaycom/pathway
  
  

Proof submission is compulsory and will be verified by the organising team.