Three young Costa Ricans became the global winners of one of the categories of the Intel AI Impact Festival, an event in which students from 26 countries participated.
This was the third edition of the festival, and the first time in which teams from Latin America participated, of which only Brazil and Costa Rica were winners in the global category.The festival seeks to generate a positive social impact through artificial intelligence (AI) projects to solve real-world problems.
Use AI to help native bees
Nicolle Gamboa Mena, Melanie Espinoza Hernández and Mariana Acuña Cordero, participated in the category of “Impact Creators in Artificial Intelligence”, for those over 18 years of age, with their project to use AI to help native bees.
Within the synopsis of their proposal they indicated that “this project proposes a tool that makes it easy to contain the first global data set of native bees in the country. The project is a set of dedicated function algorithms and hardware that relies on computer vision techniques for quantitative and qualitative analysis of image data. By using tools with vector neural network instructions and architectures like OpenVINO for object detection, it will be even easier to detect unknown or at-risk species.”
Costa Rican talent in the big leagues
“We could not receive better news, knowing that Costa Rica ended up being one of the winners, we competed and other countries such as Poland and Malaysia also won, who in topics such as innovation and artificial intelligence. This is a sign that Costa Rican talent has all the capabilities to be able to play in the big leagues,” said Paula Bogantes, minister of the Ministry of Science, Innovation, Technology and Telecommunications (MICITT).
The winners of the global competition were announced on Thursday, September 14. They won $5,000 per person, Intel-powered equipment, and mentorship from industry experts.
Besides; They will be able to travel to California, United States, to participate in Intel Innovation, a high-level event in the technology industry, which will take place on September 19 and 20.
To choose the winners, different aspects of the projects were evaluated such as the ethical use of this technology, the development of solutions aimed at generating a positive impact on society, creativity, the hardware and software implemented and whether it was aligned with the objectives. of sustainable development of the United Nations Organization.
