Two close friends and fellow students from DTU Compute were honored at the Digital Tech Summit.
Last week, the two DTU students Søren Winkel Holm and Asger Schultz returned from the tech and research event Digital Tech Summit 40,000 kroner richer. They won the Danish championship in AI (DM i AI) and The Future Talent Prize.
"We believe it is important to have a good link between universities and business to keep the focus on developing solutions to support processes and solve problems. We would like to contribute to this."
Andreas Berre Eriksen, CEO and partner at Ambolt
"It's really cool to win the Danish championships. It was a fun competition with many different strange things that we had to solve together, explain the young men who for years have followed each other in thick and thin.
They met in primary school in 3rd grade in Køge, went to high school together, even did military service together, then both applied for DTU Computer's first bachelor team in Artificial Intelligence and Data, and now they go together on the master's program Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at DTU.
"Yes, it's a wonder we're not tired of each other yet," they laugh.
The father of modern AI
Søren and Asger competed in the Danish Championships under the name ‘Hinton's Helping Hands’ with clear reference to Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the father of modern AI.
For the competition, the participating teams had to develop an AI solution for four very different tasks (Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning) over the first week of November.
There was a kind of Where's Wally? In another, they had to steer a car and drive as fast as possible without bumping into anything. In one they had to predict how many stars a movie got from the reviewer based on a text. And finally, there was an IQ test.
“It was a very creative competition, and for most of the problems, we had to find data ourselves. At the same time, we had free hands, since there was no particularly obvious way to do it. But one of the tasks was a bit similar to our bachelor project, so there we felt at home," says Søren and Asger.
Ambolt AI: Need for good coupling
The competition is organized by the company Ambolt AI with help from AI Denmark, DIREC - Digital Research Center Denmark, Aalborg University, Digital Hub Denmark, and DTU.
“We believe it is important to have a good link between universities and business to keep the focus on developing solutions to support processes and solve problems. We would like to contribute to this, and therefore we organize the competition "DM i AI" for students, and the award," explains Andreas Berre Eriksen, CEO and partner at Ambolt.
Søren and Asger expect to use the award as a travel grant when they go on an exchange during the master's program.