NAVER-HUST Hosts First ‘BK.AI-NAVER Challenge 2022’
NAVER-HUST Hosts First ‘BK.AI-NAVER Challenge 2022’
NAVER-HUST Hosts First ‘BK.AI-NAVER Challenge 2022’
- Jointly hosted by NAVER and Vietnam’s top engineering university, the country’s first-ever AI hackathon attracts 80 teams consisting of 300 university students
- The successful AI hackathon in Vietnam reflects high interest in NAVER’s global AI R&D belt that stretches from Korea and Japan to Southeast Asia and France
2022-05-25
NAVER Corp. (KRX: 035420) announced that it has successfully carried out ‘BK.AI-NAVER Challenge 2022’, the first-ever artificial intelligence (AI) hackathon in Vietnam, in partnership with Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), the top engineering school in the country. A total of 80 teams consisting of 300 Vietnamese students participated in the event on May 21-22.
With interest in the AI industry growing in Vietnam, the event challenged the country’s upcoming AI developers in three categories: Natural Language Understanding (Vietnamese Intent Detection and Slot Tagging), Body Segmentation and Gesture Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (Vietnamese Scene Text Detection and Recognition). The 15 teams that presented the most effective solutions advanced to the final round and three finalists in three categories won USD 1,000.
The AI hackathon builds on NAVER’s announcement at 2019 DEVIEW, its annual developer’s conference, that it would establish a global AI R&D belt between Korea, Japan, France and Southeast Asia. As a part of the plan, NAVER welcomed HUST as the first partner institute in Southeast Asia in 2020, and opened the joint AI R&D center in 2021. The BK.AI-NAVER Challenge 2022 is the first-ever AI hackathon in Vietnam to be co-hosted by the Korean tech company.
“Although the size of the hackathon was reduced due to the on-going pandemic in Vietnam, we received a lot of applications in two weeks,” said Park Dong-jin, executive leader at NAVER Vietnam. “Based on the enthusiastic response we received about the AI hackathon, we can tell there is high interest in NAVER’s global AI R&D belt. We will keep working together with HUST to conduct R&D in Vietnam and cultivate talented individuals.”
NAVER and HUST have achieved several milestones together by conducting five research projects in just one year since the partnership began. Based on the successful year, two disclosed four dataset and published 10 papers at global top academic conferences. NAVER Vietnam plans to open a global R&D center in Ho Chi Minh city to attract around 300 talented developers in Vietnam by 2023.
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