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The InnovAIte Hackathon, which will be held at the DIFC from March 1 to 3, in collaboration with the UAE’s National Program for Coders, will see more than 300 students in the country competing to develop cutting-edge solutions to a central theme that will be revealed on the day of the event.
The hackathon is the brainchild of Rushabh Jain, Aadi Jain, Maha Nawaz and Aryav Odhrani, four friends and students at Dubai College who want to champion innovation and diversity in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) amongst UAE students.
Rushabh Jain, a self-proclaimed “tech-geek”, and one of the members of the original quartet behind the inception of the hackathon, spoke to Zawya about why it was important to stage a national championship for UAE students.
“A lot has changed in the field of tech since the onset of AI. As a computer science student, I had dabbled in the field through early machine learning models that could predict how well one would perform in their exams based on one’s performance at school. But the introduction of ChatGPT changed the game,” Jain said.
Research by PWC shows that AI’s contribution to the Middle East economy is expected to grow annually between 20-34% to reach $320 billion by 2030.
Nearly six months of planning finally bore fruit when the UAE’s Ministry of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications gave the country’s first national AI Hackathon its stamp of approval with Emirates NBD, the DIFC Innovation Hub and Hale Education Group also coming on board.
The hackathon will see participating teams of 2 to 4 students using critical thinking to develop practical solutions that help the community around them. This will include developing working prototypes of their solutions with the aid of OpenAI APIs and other pre-existing AI tools, so that students understand AI from a practical rather than just a theoretical perspective.
According to Jain, the event currently has over 100 teams participating from 26 different schools and including 37 different nationalities, as well as a 30% female participation.
“The first two days of the hackathon will allow the judges to whittle it down to the final five teams, which will then compete on the third day for prizes exceeding AED 10,000,” Jain added.
Jain, who hopes to one day get a degree in machine learning and data science, wants this inaugural hackathon to be biannual event, allowing the next generation of coders and tech experts from the UAE to realise their true potential and map out the future of AI.
(Reporting by Bindu Rai, editing by Seban Scaria)
