The Special Interest Group for Underwater Acoustics (SIGUA) is holding a two‑day hackathon alongside the International Conference on Underwater Acoustics (ICUA) 2026. This will be the fourth SIGUA hackathon, following successful events in 2022 (Sheffield), 2023 (Bath), and 2025 (Bath).
The hackathon will take place on 14-15 June 2026 at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology & Innovation Centre in Glasgow. A dedicated session will be held on Wednesday morning of the conference, for teams to present their approaches and outcomes.
A virtual pre‑event will be held on Zoom from 10:00-12:00 on Friday 15 May 2026. During this session, Challenge Leaders from Thales, ORE Catapult, Celtic Sea Power, University of Bath, and University of Exeter will introduce their challenges and provide early access to datasets. Participants will then have the opportunity to meet one another and form teams ahead of the main event.
👉 Register here for the virtual pre-event (15 May 2026).
👉 Register here for ICUA and the hackathon (14-15 June 2026).
The hackathon offers a unique opportunity to explore current and emerging challenges in underwater acoustics, collaborate with fellow researchers, and develop innovative solutions. Small teams will work intensively on one of the industry‑defined challenges over the two days, with representatives from industry circulating between groups to offer context, insights, and support.
Challenge #1 – Marine Traffic Acoustic Footprint Assessment in the Celtic Sea
The Subsea Soundscape (S3) Offshore Wind Evidence and Change (OWEC) program pioneers a regional framework in the Celtic Sea to provide valuable insights into underwater noise conditions and marine mammal presence, informing maritime spatial planning and consenting decisions for floating wind development. To accomplish this, 21 autonomous passive acoustic monitoring stations were deployed in October 2025 for two years, and were located to capture spatial heterogeneity in soundscape characteristics, encompassing varying depths, distances from shipping lanes, and proximity to different habitat types and proposed offshore wind lease areas. For this challenge, you will be tasked with developing methods for automatic detection and characterisation of marine traffic acoustic footprints. A sub-sample of the 21x station broadband hydrophone data will be provided together with AIS data containing information of vessel types, locations and speeds.
Click here for further details
Challenge #2 – Generative Sound Production for a Submarine Serious Game
Simulation environments play a central role in underwater acoustics research, but they often rely on overly simple or repetitive source sounds that fail to capture the complex, evolving nature of real marine acoustic sources. This lack of realism is especially problematic in sonar serious‑game settings (e.g., for exploring human-AI teaming), where believable audio is essential for ecological validity. The objective of this challenge is to develop generative methods capable of producing realistic ship and / or marine‑mammal sounds whose spectral and temporal characteristics evolve plausibly with type, behaviour, and conditions.
Click here for further details
Challenge #3 – Categorisation of underwater acoustic environments
The sound speed profile describes the speed of sound at different depths in the ocean. The profile is an important factor in predicting how sound propagates in the ocean which has applications in fishing, oil, search & rescue, marine-life preservation, defence and more. The difficulty with sound speed profiles is that they change spatially and temporally over different length and time scales making it costly to calculate and store at all points in a region of interest in the ocean. If instead, sound speed profiles are categorised by their structural similarity and linked to parameters such as time (seasonal and diurnal) and geographic region, perhaps, it is possible to determine the most likely sound speeds for each category and, identify global and local variations of the sound speed profiles using these categories.
The objective of this challenge is to develop a categorisation scheme to organise individual sound speed profiles from different geographic regions into a small number of categories based on either or a combination of the physical structure of the sound speed data or the acoustic relevance of the sound speed data from which to investigate the results from different schemes and for different locations.
Click here for further details
Posted on 20th February 2026 in Early Career, Early Careers Group, Events, Noise, Noise and Soundscape, Underwater Acoustics
