HELIOS Training School & Hackathon

Correction to the record: this was a four-day residential event, not a one-day hackathon. The Federated Data Analysis Training School & Hackathon ran in Cyprus from 11 to 14 May 2026, not on 11 May alone. Venue: Alion Beach Hotel, Ayia Napa, Cyprus. Organisers: COST Action HELIOS, delivered in collaboration with HemaFAIR. Participation was open-access and free; the working language was English. Expressions of interest closed on 18 February 2026 via the organisers' application form. What the programme actually covered:

• introduction to federated analysis and federated learning frameworks
• FAIR data principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable)
• hands-on analysis using common data models
• federated querying across distributed datasets
• ethical and legal aspects — privacy, data governance and responsible data use

Who it was for: researchers, clinicians and data scientists with relevant background knowledge, with the applied emphasis on biomedical and rare-disease research. This was not an open-entry student hackathon. Why the four-day shape matters. Federated analysis is the discipline of computing over data you are never allowed to move or even see — hospital records that cannot legally leave the institution that holds them. You cannot teach that in an afternoon, because the hard part is not the model, it is the data governance and the common data model that let five hospitals answer one query without pooling a single patient row. The published agenda front-loads exactly those topics, then runs the hackathon on top of them. A one-day listing misrepresented it as a sprint when it was a training school with a build phase attached. Status: concluded. HemaFAIR and the HELIOS COST Action have both recorded the event as successfully completed, with materials deposited publicly on Zenodo. The gap in the record: no participant count, team list or hackathon outputs have been published, so there is no way to judge what the build phase produced. For anyone tracking Cyprus as a venue for EU health-data work, the useful signal is not the result but the fact that a COST Action chose Cyprus for a four-day federated-health-data school at all — that follows the same trustworthy-AI-in-health thread as the island's other recent EU placements.

Event website