WINDHOEK: Team Namibia has been named the worldwide champion of the third Seeds for the Future Tech4Good worldwide Competition.
Team Namibia consists of students from the University of Namibia and the University of Science and Technology.
The Tech4Good Global Competition encourages students to look at sustainable development challenges facing their communities and use their ICT knowledge and skills to create commercially viable solutions.
The winning proposal was an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered teaching system called YYeni AI, which responds to each student’s needs.
In a statement issued recently, Jeff Wang, President of Huawei’s Public Affairs and Communications Department, said that Huawei Cloud’s MetaStudio digital content production pipeline orchestrated the demonstration by training the Pangu Virtual Human Model with Wang’s image and voice data. Wang recently attended the awards ceremony virtually using an innovative, highly realistic avatar technology.
He said that YYeni AI provides persona
lised tutoring to individual students in large classes and added that the app uses AI algorithms to guide students through their coursework and show their real-time progress. This greatly improves students’ learning experience even when teaching resources are scarce.
”The Second and Third Prizes in this year’s Competition went to Team Uzbekistan’s Aquatibia Solution and Team Germany’s TraceWaters Solution. Team Uzbekistan was also named Champion of the Tech4Good Middle East and Central Asia Regional Competition in September 2023,” he said.
In 2023, 152 teams from 74 countries and regions participated in the competition, 70 per cent more than in 2022. A People’s Choice Award was also bestowed this year based on public voting. The total number of votes received was nearly 300,000, with Team Brazil and Team Uzbekistan coming out on top, he said.
Wang further called this year’s participants the backbone of Namibia’s future digital society and praised their obvious passion for using digital technology to prom
ote social inclusion.
He noted that their solutions were designed to address several sustainability and social issues, from natural resource protection and cancer diagnosis to education equity and sign language translation.
Wang also announced that the top three teams and winners of the People’s Choice Award will be invited to participate in a Seeds for the Future digital tour to China in 2024.
Source: The Namibia Press Agency