Three Student Teams Win AI Summit London’s Hackathon

Three teams came out on top as winners of the AI Summit London’s 2024 Hackathon where students from top U.K. universities showcased their AI talents, impressing judges with their innovative solutions. 

The winning teams hailed from the University of Southampton’s AI Society, Anglia Ruskin University and Queen Mary University London. 

Across the two-day event, U.K. university students from undergraduate to Ph.D. level had just 36 hours to solve a complex AI challenge.

The teams were tasked with a problem statement from Tata Consultancy Services: To build an AI agent for connecting insurance companies with employers and consultancy firms to ensure employees receive benefits.

The students were given access to Fetch.AI’s agent technology and were able to draw on expertise from experts from Imperial College London.

The judges were meant to pick just two winners but were so impressed they decided to crown three winners instead. 

“It was an amazing outcome. The projects were amazingly built. It's been an amazing experience at the hackathon with AI Summit,” said Fetch.ai’s Sana Wajid, who was one of the judges.

“We cannot achieve any AI technology to go forward without this new generation,” Wajid said. “We need to empower and make sure that they built the right application that we’re looking for.

Related:OpenAI Chief Architect Predicts Huge Large Language Model Leaps

One of the three winning teams was from the University of Southampton’s AI Society. 

The smallest of the three winning teams, consisting of just Jakub Nowacki and Dhruv Khanna, said it was easier to organize the project but harder to split up tasks.

“It was an amazing experience,” said Khanna. “I have been wanting to come to this since last year, but I finally got the opportunity to participate so that was an exhilarating experience.”

Nowacki said students taking part next year should let their imaginations run wild.

“I feel like this is a very safe space and it is very welcoming to all sorts of ideas,” Nowacki said. “I'd never have thought there'd be something existing like the hackathon with Fetch.AI here.”

The winning team of postgraduates from Anglia Ruskin University. Shashank Puijala, Kshipra Dhame, Gayathri Singaram and Abhishek Gangani said the hackathon presented them with career opportunities. 

“It's a very big plus point for our CV and our career,” said Singaram. “We're just starting and to being on a big platform like the hackathon, it's a great thing.”

The third winning team from Queen Mary University London included Yuzo Makitani, Shashank Yadav, Wen Qing Lim, Alex Chen and Zora Huang. 

Related:EY, Unilever, Ocado Share Strategies for Ethical AI Deployments

“We didn't come in with any expectation, as long as we learned something new, which we did with the fetch AI framework and interacted and met with new people totally won it out of the hackathon. Winning it was just icing on the cake,” said Makitani.