Qai, a global technology company headquartered in Qatar, and Hugging Face, a leading technology platform and community for AI, have hosted Qai’s first hackathon event, bringing together over 140 engineers, students and researchers from across Doha’s technology community.
Held recently at M7 (Msheireb Cultural Forum), the event saw 45 teams develop working AI prototypes that address a challenge in Qatar leveraging open-source models and tools available on Hugging Face.
Participants were supported throughout the weekend with technical workshops and mentoring from Qai and Hugging Face engineers. On the final day, teams pitched their projects to a panel of judges from both organisations. Final projects spanned healthcare, nutrition, Arabic language, environment, cybersecurity, and drone technology.
Team YOLO, an all-female team of students from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), took first place for their innovative AI build, AquaGuard, which offers an early warning system that protects Qatar’s desalination plants from pollution (oil spills) and red tides.
Team All you need is a Hug (second place) and team Gradient Descent (third place) also received special recognition for their respective AI projects; Qalaf, a historical depiction and development comparison between Qatar in 1908 and present-day, leveraging travel manuscripts accessed from Qatar National Library; and Rasad, an AI drone monitoring and tracking solution. The winning teams received Hugging Face and Qai compute credits.
Participants were drawn from Qatar-based universities, organisations and startups. The hackathon supports Qai’s goal of engaging and nurturing leading AI talent in Qatar. It brings together Qai’s mission to enable and scale trusted AI with Hugging Face’s global open-source community, with the shared aim of building a strong pipeline of AI talent in the region.
Asmaa Fikree, Chief Strategy officer at Qai, said: “Over three days at M7, we saw what Qatar’s talent can achieve with the right tools, mentors and partners to catapult ideas into working prototypes. Developing talent is central to what Qai is building, and we look forward to seeing these teams take their ideas to the next level and to continue supporting the ecosystem with similar initiatives.”
Sayak Paul, senior researcher at Hugging Face said: “We're very excited to be in this part of the world for the very first time to do an event. From day one, we have been seeing and feeling the energy from the participants, which is exactly what we anticipated. Hopefully, this is the start of something collaborative and meaningful. We're grateful to the Qai team for working with us to make this happen. We'll hopefully be back for more.”
Members of team YOLO commented: “We have really enjoyed the whole Hackathon01 experience. We spent a long time trying to find a real problem that we could try to solve. Once we found one and thoroughly researched it, we were very motivated. Water purity is incredibly important to life in the Gulf region. Our team built a real solution for a real problem in Qatar, and we are very proud of it.”
