KAUST team wins NEOM AI Challenge

About

In June this year, KAUST students were invited to Dream up ideas and Imagine new solutions for solving challenges in NEOM using AI Models. This was organized by a Saudi national competition for all universities in the Kingdom. 100+ projects were submitted to the organizing committee (https://neomchallenge.com/en). 

A big thank you to the 14 teams of KAUST students who submitted proposals to the committee led by Professors Wolfgang Heidrich and Jeff Shamma. According to the rules, only three teams per university could participate in three focus areas: Energy, Entertainment, and Mobility. 

With submissions from 30+ other universities, the KAUST Entertainment team, led by Prof. Bernard Ghanem, has won the national prize while the Energy and Mobility teams have made it successfully as semifinalists. Congratulation!

Without further ado, below are the names of the winning team with a little information on the project they worked on! 

Abdullah Hamdi, ​Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mattia Soldan, ​Electrical and Computer Engineering
Jesus Alejandro Zarzar Torano, ​Electrical and Computer Engineering
Guohao Li, Computer Science

KAUST Entertainment Project:

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.