Vietnam AI Grand Challenge Recap

On August 16, 2019, Kambria and its partners hosted the Vietnam AI Grand Challenge Hackathon Grand Finale, a 40-hour AI developer competition held at Hanoi University of Science and Technology. This event was a culmination of four months of education, mentoring and organization by Kambria and its co-hosts after a three-city series of qualifiers in Ho Chi Minh City (June 28-30), Da Nang (July 5-7) and Hanoi (July 12-14). 

aigrandchallenge.com

The 12 teams competing in the Grand Finale represented the best teams from the Grand Challenge series and demonstrated the outstanding AI projects young Vietnamese talent is capable of developing. 

The event took place within the framework of the AI4VN National Artificial Intelligence Festival, organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Planning and Investment, Hanoi University of Science and Technology and VnExpress with the goal of connecting policymakers, managers, technology companies, research units, and engineers to find AI solutions across industries.

Previously, at regional rounds, teams competed in 40-hour hackathons to develop the Ultimate AI Virtual Assistant in areas such as retail, education, and healthcare. Solutions included automatic chatbot calls, product counseling for customers through face recognition, virtual assistants to help users learn English from daily news, and alerts to prevent harassment and sexual abuse.

Kambria AI Incubation Program
To prepare for the Grand Finale, 12 winning teams from regional rounds participated in the Kambria AI Incubation Program and received mentoring from over 20 AI experts, business CEOs and major international AI research units. The purpose of incubation was to further develop each team’s idea and to strengthen its technical aspects. 
Other benefits of the Incubation Program included:

• $3,000 in AWS credits
• 1 million VND gift voucher at Highlands Coffee
• Elsa Speak Pro 1-year accounts for all team members
• A space at Kambria, DNES, Cinnamon AI, UP Coworking Space
• 2 mentoring sessions with AI experts
• 2+ meetings with corporate partners 
• 2 online coaching sessions geared towards pitching products
• 3-4 technical workshops
• Exclusive access to the Facebook group Kambria AI Incubation Program
• Airfare & accommodations in Hanoi for the Grand Finale

From the pool of 12, 8 teams were selected and given 8 minutes to present their projects at the Vietnam AI Grand Challenge Hackathon Final, followed by 8 minutes to answer questions from a professional council consisting of AI experts from leading technology corporations, representatives of investment funds and well-known organizations such as McKinsey, Topica, VinTech, Vin Ventures, VietAI, Vietnam Innovation Network (VIN). 
Projects were evaluated on four general criteria: 

1. How well the team demonstrated the value and practicality of their solution to potential customers
2. The ability of the project to call capital from investors
3. The potential of the technology within the program and its progress thereafter.
4. The level of support garnered from community voting

At the event, Mr. Bui The Duy, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, stated: "From the context of not having any individuals or units in Vietnam dare to compete in the international development arena, Vietnam has made great progress quickly and converged with the world. Competitions like the AI4VN National Hackathon give our young talent the opportunity to train, develop and devote themselves with passion, bringing effective technology solutions to the community.” 
Leading projects will have further opportunity for development alongside Vietnamese corporations seeking AI virtual assistant solutions. Kambria is proud of the hard work and creativity all teams demonstrated throughout the Grand Challenge series. Below is a list of winning teams and summaries for all Grand Finale teams. 

Meet the Winning Teams!
Champion of the National Grand Finale Prize of $10,000 -- Voicebot
Intelligent Virtual Switchboard Solution 

Voicebot was the big winner of the Grand Finale with their intelligent virtual switchboard solution. Their smart virtual PBX solution can be used by retail stores to automatically interact with customers via voice to receive orders and answer questions. Voicebot also developed an automatic customer care function to proactively call customers to receive product feedback. 

Grand Prize Winner of $5,000 -- Team YoungGRD
Linguistics Education AI Virtual Assistant

• Generates English learning materials from news articles
• Crawls the latest English news articles from various sources
• Generates sets of reading comprehension and grammar tests from materials
• Bases questions on the user’s skill level
• Provides immediate feedback
• Tools used — NLP, Recommendations

First Runner Up Prize of  $4000 -- Team Voicebot
Retail Support Assistant

• Smart virtual switchboard for retail chains
• Automatically interacts with a customer by voice
• Receives orders and questions from customers
• Automatically provides customer service
• Calls each customer to get product and service feedback
• Tools used — Speech recognition (speech-to-text) and Speech synthesis (text-to-speech)

Second Runner Up Prize of $2000 -- Team FatherLife
Healthcare Monitoring for the Elderly

• AI Chatbot used to identify people and their emotions through the camera
• Check whether the user has done exercises correctly
• Loads and displays camera from Ohmni Robot
• Tools used — TFlearn – Assessing exercises – assess posture (right or wrong) and count the number of exercises; tfpose and SVM – identifies human skeleton to classify correct posture; Google Cloud Server, Tornado, and webRTC

Grand Challenge Community Voting
As mentioned above, one of the judging criteria was community support. Kambria sends a huge thanks to our community members who voted. Each Kambrian who voted for the winning Grand Finale team was entered into a random prize draw. And 5 lucky Kambrians were chosen to win the following prizes:

First Prize Winner: 600,000 KAT + $500 worth of additional KAT goes to Oanh Nguyen!

Second Prize Winner: 450,000 KAT + $200 worth of additional KAT goes to Ngoc Do!

3 x Third Prize Winners: Each will receive 150,000 KAT + $100 worth of additional KAT goes to Phan Xuan Phuc, To Tran Tien, Anh NTT NEU!

Congratulations to all of the Community Voting winners. The teams appreciate your support!

Team Summaries
Each team who participated is a winner. Here are summaries of the rest of the team competing in the Grand Finale. This is not the end for many of these projects — only the beginning!

Team FamTech — Retail Online Support Assistant

• Automatically collects product information
• Advises users on product selection based on their needs
• Generates succinct reports and reviews for products from popular platforms
• Searches nearest store with products in stock
• AI voice chat/conversation support
• Tools used — Rasa chatbot framework, No-SQL Mongo Database, Laravel framework

Team Bookworm — Retail Backend Support Assistant

• Auto generates leads via search and social media algorithms
• Auto connects leads to staff via SMS & e-mail with integrated AI chatbot
• AI chatbot auto introduces the products & manages the ordering process
• Tools used: AWS Amplify, S3, Cloudfront, DynamoDB, SNS, Java & web driver, FPT OpenAI, Rasa Core, NodeJS, ReactJS

Team DTUCSE — Retail Customer Support Assistant

• Identifies customers and their emotions
• Communicates and interacts with a customer
• Recommends suitable products
• Provides customer support & locates products by voice
• Tools used — Convolutional neural networks (Alexnet), Cosine Similarity (data mining), Google API, Deep Speech, NLP (Simple neural network)

Team FTech — Retail Customer Support Assistant

• Identifies gender and age of customers
• Recommends suitable products
• Provides customer support
• Tools used — Facial detection & recognition, gender & age classification, AI Chatbot, recommendation system

Team HOPE — Elderly Care AI Virtual Assistant

• Gathers image data from a camera
• Real-time object detection detects when a person has fallen down

• Warns relatives and first-responders with a video of the event

• Tools used — Object (human) detection: detects movement vectors of falling persons, computer vision

Team Antimatlab — Social impact AI to prevent & stop harassment and attacks

• Automatic detection of harassment behaviors in elevators and workspaces
• Automatic intervention (sirens) to interrupt and prevent continued behavior
• Alerts building managers of an incident
• Tools used — Computer vision: SNN + LSTM for realtime video processing, Flask, PostgreSQL, & Firebase

Team Hydra — Healthcare assistant

• Assists parents in taking care of their child
• Monitors children’s health
• Tools used — Voice recognition, Vietnamese NLP, Data processing, machine learning, deep learning, Mobile app, web app, and API programming

Team tobtob — Fastfood Chatbot

• Order food and beverages at restaurants and hotels over a chatbot.
• Supports human-like interaction through images, voice, and complex dialogue.
• Technology used — NLP and Vision

Team Code_for_Food — Food and Beverage Voicebot

• Order food and beverages over a voicebot
• Save list of dishes, users and order information (including updating the total amount in the order) to the database
• Allow users and admins to delete dishes already ordered through the web interface.
• Technology used — Chatbot Framework: Rasa Vel Google DialogFlow, Database: MySQL, Web application: Flask Framework with Python

To watch the full event televised by VnExpress, click here. 

Kambria Bounty Platform 
The Vietnam AI Grand Challenge was a huge success with over 700 developers and 187 teams registering to compete. Once teams completed registration, they are able to access their profile and free membership resources on the Kambria platform. They are also able to submit their hackathon project proposals through the site during the event. 

Reward Distribution

The Grand Challenge prize pool totaled $40,000 payable in cash and KAT. KAT awarded through the hackathons will be deposited directly into the bounty platform for use by participating developers. Developers can also choose to withdraw their KAT to the wallet of their choice. In addition to cash and KAT, winners will also receive Karma for their contributions. Karma is a non-tradeable ledger entry that Kambria awards to contributors on the Kambria Platform. There are many benefits to having Karma, including the opportunity to share in Kambria’s future revenue.

Resource Library

To support our participants, Kambia created a comprehensive resource library. This educational tool is available to anyone who holds KAT. Our library is an invaluable resource, full of technical documents, educational material, and peer-reviewed research articles. 
Sample articles include:

• Real World Applications of AI Virtual Assistants: 
• Top Research Papers In Conversational AI For Chatbots And Intelligent Agents
• Pro Tips to Rock Your Hackathon Challenges
• How You Can Use Hackathons to Build Your Killer App
• The Role Of Hackathons In Corporate Innovation

Let Kambria Organize Your Next Hackathon
Hackathons and bounty challenges are two of the ways Kambria helps corporations with their corporate innovation journeys. Contact us to discuss how we can create advanced technology solutions through K-prize bounty challenges for your company using our platform and in-person hackathons.
Email: info@kambria.io