site.btaBulgarian Students Win Third Place in AI Hackathon

Microsoft, KPMG, and UNESCO hosted the first hackathon of the 2022 Imagine Cup Junior Virtual AI Hackathons series, Microsoft said. The Bulgarian teams Quadcore and Yottabyte shared a third place with their environmental solutions.

The hackathons aim to prepare students for the artificial intelligence (AI) governed economy of the future. AI can be a key factor in solving some of the world’s most urgent problems, such as lack of widely available quality education, human rights violations, equality and inclusion, environmental sustainability.

The first hackathon saw 21 teams representing nine countries compete against each other. The competing students attended a series of practical exercises. They could then test their newly-acquired knowledge while using AI to try and solve the fundamental challenges facing the planet’s environment today.

Team Quadcore’s idea was a remotely controlled global seed bank, which utilizes AI and the internet of things to trace plant species in real time in order to ensure suitable growth environment (humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressure). The team described their project as a “digital twin” of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Bulgarian students spent a long time researching the optimal weather conditions for the edelweiss, which was their plant of choice. “Participating in this hackathon was hard, but also fun. We were motivated by the opportunity to study modern technologies and to offer a solution to an important problem: preserving rare plant and animal species,” the team said.

Team Yottabyte suggested combining satellite imagery and AI to notify people about polluted coastlines in their area. The team said that this competition was an excellent opportunity for students to present their ideas to world-renowned experts. “These couple of days were incredibly rewarding, and we would absolutely recommend this experience to anyone interested in technology,” the team commented.

Team Data from Latvia won the event with their idea of protecting bat populations worldwide. Kazakhstani team Unicode took second place with their solution for protecting tiger populations.