In June of this year, KAUST students were invited to dream up ideas and imagine new solutions for solving challenges in NEOM using AI Models. The NEOM AI Challenge was organized as a Saudi national competition for all universities in the Kingdom. Over a hundred projects were submitted to the organizing committee.
A total of fourteen KAUST teams submitted proposals in one of three focus areas to be solved using AI models and technologies: Energy, Entertainment, and Mobility. The selection committee, led by Professors Wolfgang Heidrich and Jeff Shamma, selected three teams, one per challenge, to represent KAUST at the NEOM AI Challenge.
And the winners are…
A team led by Professor Bernard Ghanem, won the National prize in the Entertainment category, beating over 30 teams from around the Kingdom. KAUST teams in the Energy and Mobility portions of the competition also performed well, making it into the top-five in their respective challenge categories.Congratulations to all teams!
The winning team, led by Bernard Ghanem included:
- Abdullah Hamdi, Electrical Engineering
- Mattia Soldan, Electrical Engineering
- Jesus Alejandro Zarzar Torano, Electrical Engineering
- Guohao Li, Computer Science
The winning proposal
We have witnessed in the past few years a boom in the E-sports gaming industry with several online competitions, e.g. Fortnite, FIFA, LOL, GTA to name a few. This has opened new doors for unprecedented economic opportunities through online streaming and advertising campaigns.
We propose to step up this industry by merging it with modern tools from computer vision and machine learning to provide AI educational competitions with the flavor of “Human vs AI” that is currently picking up with AlphaZero and AlphaStar by Google DeepMind.
Since “data is the new oil,” we will be utilizing the generated data from the competitions to build better AI agents for future games and challenges. We believe that this will open new advertising opportunities and a new market for data collection that will be provided to the world by NEOM.