It was two sleepless nights of hard work and passion for the 210 over students who took part in the 2nd A.I.CKATHON challenge at Iskandar Space Johor Bahru. Organised by University Malaysia and Iskandar Investment, the event saw tech students brainstorm their minds and skills over the weekend to complete the tasks and win the challenge.
A total of 44 groups took part in the hackathon. The students are from various private and government universities in Malaysia. There were also 4 international teams from Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia taking part in the challenge.
The challenge required students to come up with solutions for smart cities or smart retail using Artificial Intelligence. The students had to use at least one of the three APIs provided for their tasks. The APIs included fashion API, facial API and license plate recognition API.
The students had just under 48 hours to complete their tasks. And the tasks proved to be rather challenging for most of them. The students spent the day and night hacking and working together with their teammates. For some, the challenges were something totally new to them. They had to learn everything from start while for some students, the tasks seemed quite straightforward.
Ng Yit Tyn, President of the organising committee for the event from the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology University Malaya said, “The purpose of the event was to create a platform for students to test out their skills. In Malaysia, we don’t have that many hackathons that focus on Artificial Intelligence. We feel that the students will learn a lot from this hackathon will also gain more experience over the competition.”
She added that the event was totally free of charge for the students, with transportation provided thanks to the numerous sponsors towards it. Sponsors and technology partner for the event included Dell EMC and Intel while COQNITICS sponsored the API.
Eric Kang, Senior Program Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group South Asia Dell EMC said, “I am expecting to get some of the use cases from the participants. As this competition is at the ASEAN level, we can see the difference between Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand. It doesn’t represent everything, but we can certainly compare some differences. I hope for ASEAN this will be the way. It is never too late as long as we have the tools and the skills. This is an opportunity for ASEAN to catch up with the bigger nations. We have seen how India has transformed into a global software hub and now from China. So, there is definitely prospects in this region as well.”
Looking at the students, Eric said that some of them are here to win. But for some he added, this is probably their first hackathon and they are puzzled spending a couple of hours trying to figure out their first use case.
On the last day, the teams had to present their projects to a panel of six judges which included a representative from Intel, Iskandar Investment, University Malaya and others. There were two rounds of judging. The first round saw all 44 teams pitch their technological innovation and creativity. The 44 teams will then be reduced to 10 teams for the final round.
In the final round, the teams were judged on the utilisation of the AI technology, the design and impact of their application, its scalability and technical difficulties. It was a pretty tense situation for the teams as all of them were bombarded with lots of questions from the judges.
Some of the projects included smart traffic management systems, smart parking systems, using facial recognition for shopping clothes and keeping up with fashion trends as well as using emotions to buy food.
Nukman Abdul Rahman, Head of Digital for Iskandar Investment, who was also one of the judges said, “A lot of them have very good ideas but still needs a lot of work. 48 hours is not enough to patch things out. But the fact that some of them can demonstrate something shows the amount of talent they have.”
In the end, team OwlNext from Multimedia University were crowned champions. The winning team made up of Louis Ong Bing Hao, Adris Ichiro Bin Mohd Faris and Nurul Artika Zambri walk away with RM10000. Their team designed a new e-commerce system that uses both virtual reality and augmented reality.
“By using these technologies, it allows people to visualise their product as they are buying it,” said Louis. They hope to that someday their e-commerce platform will be understood by all.
Archive
- October 2024(44)
- September 2024(94)
- August 2024(100)
- July 2024(99)
- June 2024(126)
- May 2024(155)
- April 2024(123)
- March 2024(112)
- February 2024(109)
- January 2024(95)
- December 2023(56)
- November 2023(86)
- October 2023(97)
- September 2023(89)
- August 2023(101)
- July 2023(104)
- June 2023(113)
- May 2023(103)
- April 2023(93)
- March 2023(129)
- February 2023(77)
- January 2023(91)
- December 2022(90)
- November 2022(125)
- October 2022(117)
- September 2022(137)
- August 2022(119)
- July 2022(99)
- June 2022(128)
- May 2022(112)
- April 2022(108)
- March 2022(121)
- February 2022(93)
- January 2022(110)
- December 2021(92)
- November 2021(107)
- October 2021(101)
- September 2021(81)
- August 2021(74)
- July 2021(78)
- June 2021(92)
- May 2021(67)
- April 2021(79)
- March 2021(79)
- February 2021(58)
- January 2021(55)
- December 2020(56)
- November 2020(59)
- October 2020(78)
- September 2020(72)
- August 2020(64)
- July 2020(71)
- June 2020(74)
- May 2020(50)
- April 2020(71)
- March 2020(71)
- February 2020(58)
- January 2020(62)
- December 2019(57)
- November 2019(64)
- October 2019(25)
- September 2019(24)
- August 2019(14)
- July 2019(23)
- June 2019(54)
- May 2019(82)
- April 2019(76)
- March 2019(71)
- February 2019(67)
- January 2019(75)
- December 2018(44)
- November 2018(47)
- October 2018(74)
- September 2018(54)
- August 2018(61)
- July 2018(72)
- June 2018(62)
- May 2018(62)
- April 2018(73)
- March 2018(76)
- February 2018(8)
- January 2018(7)
- December 2017(6)
- November 2017(8)
- October 2017(3)
- September 2017(4)
- August 2017(4)
- July 2017(2)
- June 2017(5)
- May 2017(6)
- April 2017(11)
- March 2017(8)
- February 2017(16)
- January 2017(10)
- December 2016(12)
- November 2016(20)
- October 2016(7)
- September 2016(102)
- August 2016(168)
- July 2016(141)
- June 2016(149)
- May 2016(117)
- April 2016(59)
- March 2016(85)
- February 2016(153)
- December 2015(150)