The closing ceremony of “Qodwa-Tech Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hackathon: Reviving Culture and Heritage” took place on March 9.
The hackathon was organized as part of She Can 2020, with the aim to raise women’s awareness of the technological updates and equip them with the needed skills and knowledge to develop solutions using technology and AI to revive heritage and culture.
The hackathon comprised a large number of innovative ideas that use ICT and link it with heritage and culture. Ideas included creating an interactive library as a virtual working space, and a mobile application that identifies the date of a historic place by scanning it using the mobile camera. This is in addition to ideas for simulating historic places, an idea to revive Egyptian heritage through shedding light on ancient queens, and ideas for technological applications that encourage youth to promote tourism.
The contesting teams of innovative female entrepreneurs submitted a lot of ideas, projects and applications. With mentoring and guidance, they were able to employ AI in their projects.
The hackathon included a number of motivating and supportive workshops for exchanging experiences and knowledge, as well as effective leadership from specialists and experts, contributing to the development of more ideas for improving the contesting applications. This provided an opportunity for innovation to develop digital solutions to overcome the challenges facing the society and help keep up with the digital transformation trends in Egypt.
The first place winner is an idea of a program that uses AI to read and translate ancient Egyptian texts in Hieroglyphic, into any language based on the user preference, using interactive user interface.
The hackathon was organized by the Central Department for Community Development at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), in collaboration with Microsoft, Care Egypt Foundation and Entreprenelle, on March 7-9. The competition jury comprised experts from Robusta, Sprints and Nagwa companies.
The hackathon is one of the activities of “Girls in ICT” track of MCIT initiative “Qodwa-Tech”. The track focuses on developing young women’s skills in IT applications, programming and computer science, to help them succeed in their future careers.
Around 120 young women applied for the hackathon, 50 of which were selected according to specific criteria. Participants, throughout the three-day hackathon, received training and mentoring on technology and entrepreneurship areas, how to link culture with technology to apply ideas with the highest possible quality, and how to find funding opportunities.
