From 10 to 13 September 2018 the AI for Life Hackathon will take place on SKEMA Business school’s three French campuses in Paris, Lille and Sophia Antipolis. This event is partnered by ESIEA, Microsoft and INRIA.
The management students in their first year of the SKEMA Grand Ecole programme will be working together with engineering students from ESIEA and MIAGE students from the Université Côte d’Azur and the Ecole Centrale, Lille. In all, 950 students will be working to find innovative, sustainable solutions using artificial intelligence, while they also question the societal impact of each project from three different angles: people, profit, planet.
The hackathon includes student coaching on all three campuses and several simultaneously interconnected events are programmed (the opening session, meetings with practitioners and an intercampus final competition). During these events question and answer sessions will be live on Twitter: #ieSKEMA
Among participating practitioners, students will be fortunate enough to meet Dr Luc Julia, the inventor of SIRI, vice-president Innovation - Samsung Electronics in California and director of Samsung AI research centres. Discussions are also programmed with Lionel Prévost, University professor, (professeur des Universités), director of AI research at ESIEA’s Learning, Data & Robotics (LDR) lab. Also part of the event are directors of innovation from Microsoft and IBM as well as seven start-ups that will showcase their services. Researchers from INRIA and ESIEA will give technical explanations of AI and machine learning tools.
Students will use video to pitch their projects to a panel of judges* who will designate the three winners. The winning students will receive humanoid programmable robots offered by ESIEA.
In line with SKEMA’s DNA, the hackathon has three pedagogical objectives: developing creativity and the capacity to innovate while encouraging students to ask important questions about the ethical implications of the technologies that will forge tomorrow’s world.
*Louis Jouanny, general director of the ESIEA Group, P. Xelot, IBM Start-ups Ecosystems Europe manager, Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, CEO IbanFirst, Virginie Cohen, IBM Systems Lab Services Europe manager, Sophie Gay, director of the SKEMA Grande Ecole programme, and the mayors of ‘Villages by CA’: (green-tech hubs fostered by the Credit Agricole): Fabrice Marsella (Paris), Franck Bielher (Lille) and Jean-François Richardoz (Sophia Antipolis).