Two San Jose State students won grand prizes during Intel’s AI For Social Good Hackathon event at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in Downtown San Jose on Sept. 26.
The hackathon featured students who showcased their machine learning skills, were taught how to build full end-to-end products and had the opportunity to study MLOps pipelines using data ingestion to model their deployments.
MLOps is a machine learning engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying ML (machine learning) system development and system operation.
Attendees would also automatically qualify to attend “Intel Innovation,” which is an event where Intel displays their latest advancements in AI technology.
The reward given to the winning team was an Intel NUC 12 Pro X Kit, which consists of a small-form-factor computer. This $1,400 kit comes with a 4.90 GHz processor chip which can be used towards the 64 GB memory card inside the computer.
Ankur Singh, who is pursuing his masters degree in computer software engineering at SJSU, and Tirupati Venkata Sri Sai Rama Raju Penmatsa, who is also pursuing his masters degree in computer software engineering at SJSU, were the grand prize winning team of the Hackathon event.
Singh said it was so important to him that he had won the entire competition, and winning had revealed his talents to himself.
“Winning this competition has boosted my confidence a lot,” Singh said. “It’s kind of a validation that I am on the right track.”
Singh, who is now leading an ML team at Zoop.one, got into AI work because of his passion for creating.
Zoop.one is an information technology company based in India that specializes in the fields of identity management and security, according to its website.
“I got into AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) because of my curiosity for building intelligent systems,” Singh said. “I plan to continue developing my skills in AI as the field is growing very rapidly.”
Both Singh and Penmatsa won first place with their AI designs.
“Winning this competition helped me in gaining self confidence,” Penmatsa said. “The kind of confidence that I am in the right direction of learning.”
Like his partner, Penmatsa said he has a passion for building AI, but what pushed him to actually get into it was the 2004 sci-fi thriller movie “I, Robot.”
“I, Robot” stars Will Smith and showcases a world where humans and AI robots live together. The technology behind the film opened the eyes of many to all the possibilities technology can have on society in the future.
Penmatsa said AI is a vast and complex field of study to get into, which is why he knew he needed assistance.
He said his teammate, Singh, motivated him to join Intel’s competition.
“I got to know about this event through my friend on the research team,” Penmatsa said. “I wanted to join him and thus ended up going together as a team.”
Both Singh and Penmatsa said they have an idea of what their goals are now that they have won this year’s hackathon event.
Singh said he plans on participating in future AI hackathon events and competitions, while continuing to grow his skills in the AI field.
For Penmatsa, he said he sees himself working on his strengths and weaknesses in the technology field.
He said after working on those strengths and weaknesses, he plans on deploying AI models into real world scenarios, where actions can be taken to advance the intelligence system for each product.
“Motivation has always been my fascination, especially with how we could teach computers to recognize various things and give them intelligence,” Penmatsa said.
