AI Quest puts computing talent to work on AI for climate action

27 Oct 2023

A groundbreaking annual challenge that aims to bring together some of the brightest minds in computing, the inaugural AI Quest is a collaboration between University College Cork’s School of Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT), the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, the SFI Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (CRT-AI) and Cadence Design Systems.

This initiative is a major step forward in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability.

The Quest will foster collaboration and competition among students from Irish universities and around the world to tackle real-world challenges. This year's challenge focuses on the development of reliable AI for recognising vegetation patches from high-resolution aerial images of beautiful Irish landscapes.

“We encourage all AI learners and enthusiasts to embrace our AI challenge with an open heart to help foster a sustainability mindset and bring solutions that can help protect our planet” said Prof. John O'Halloran, President of University College Cork at the launch of the Quest, adding that it’s a call to action supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Co-originator of the Quest, Dr Harry Nguyen says: "The UCC AI Quest aspires to become a gateway to a sustainable future, where amazing technologies, real-world challenges and innovative solutions converge. We hope to stir great interest in artificial intelligence, nurture industry-relevant talents and foster inventive collaborations amongst third-level education students in Ireland and worldwide."

"Cadence is committed to developing solutions that can be leveraged to improve efficiency whilst reducing consumption. We are excited to support this challenge, which represents a first class opportunity to showcase the novel application of computational technologies to address evolving sustainability challenges,” said Steve Hollands, Software Engineering Group & Site Director of Cadence.

The UCC AI Quest 2023 points to the growing importance of AI in sustainable development. It will contribute to the development of robust artificial intelligence models, facilitating sustainable solutions. As part of this endeavour, a new dataset of realistic drone images will be released for benchmarking semantic segmentation from various above-ground levels.

The challenge features several awards, including:
● €5,000 for the best team
● €1,000 for the most creative solution
● €1,000 for the top woman of influence

The top AI solutions will be selected for presentations based on predefined performance metrics, with prizes chosen by a panel of experts. Organisers' decisions are considered final.

Target participants for this event include students with a strong passion for building AI solutions, representing third-level education institutions in Ireland and worldwide universities. Teams should consist of 3-5 members, with at least one team member from an Irish university.
The performance evaluation in the challenge involves semantic segmentation, classifying each pixel in an image from a predefined set of labels. The intersection of union (IoU) will be employed for evaluation, calculated based on the confusion matrix for each test patch.

The UCC AI Quest will follow the following schedule:
● Warm Up Phase: October 25th, 2023, 12 PM (Wed)
● Launch of Challenge: December 15th, 2023, 12 PM (Fri)
● End of Challenge: January 25th, 2024, 12 PM (Thu)
● Solution Presentation & Award Ceremony at Aula Maxima: February 3rd, 2024, 1 PM (Sat)

For more on this story contact:

UCC AI Quest website

The organising committee includes the School of Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT), Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, the SFI Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (CRT-AI) and Cadence.

Further information