NORTH STAR
Building Europe's AI & Robotics future
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Upcoming
OpenLab @ The Vessel
Visit our open lab in AI & Robotics, build your own project or help us with our engineering initiatives.
Tectonic 2026 · Ghent
Belgium's tech conference returns to Wintercircus and De Vooruit in Ghent, bringing together startups, investors, enterprises, and policymakers. The 32 best teams from the hackathon's first round, including the Antwerp round we hosted, build and pitch in the final for a €10,000 prize.
Research Paper Club · Ghent
Research Paper Club at Lighthouse in Ghent. Corrie Bartelheimer walks through "Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences" (Christiano et al., 2017), the paper behind RLHF: what it solved, what it left open, and why it still matters.
AI Workshop @ FTI · Ghent
A free drop-in AI workshop at Wintercircus Ghent as part of FTI. Adults with no technical background get a first hands-on go at AI, with 15 laptop stations, 30-minute guided sessions, and open tables for drop-in building with North Star mentors.
DevDay Exchange Community · Brussels
A community watch party at BeCentral Brussels for OpenAI DevDay: selected highlights, a discussion of the announcements, and time to share projects with local builders. Hosted by Codex Ambassador Oleksandr Tsepukh and North Star.
Where we’ve been
Tectonic Hackathon · Antwerp
Public AI Hackathon · Antwerp
OpenAI Build Week Community Hackathon - Brussels
OpenAI Codex Community Meetup — Antwerp
OpenAI Codex Community Meetup
Hackers & Ravers
TechXperience: OpenClaw Workshop
Benelux Robotics Meetup
ElevenLabs Worldwide Hackathon (Community Edition)
Agentic Payments Hackathon with Stripe
Tectonic
Future In Bloom Pt. I
Kids AI Vibecoding Hackathon
AI Hackathon III
SIGNAL II
Robotics Hackathon I
SIGNAL I
AI Hackathon II
AI Hackathon I
An atelier for intelligent machines
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ExploreStories
More robots are coming to The Vessel
The Vessel is expanding its shared robotics infrastructure with new robots, perception tools, workshop equipment and physical AI projects.
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First open Robotics and AI Lab in Belgium
The Vessel is an open robotics and AI lab in the Antwerp port area. Think of it as a forever hackathon.
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The Cost of Connection
Brain drain breaks the chain of people lifting other people up. How do we ignite Belgium's tech ecosystem?
ReadWe ♥
Our friends
Let's build it together