KARACHI:Young participants from Alkhidmat Karachi Region achieved outstanding success in Pakistan's largest Grand AI Hackathon organized by Chinese technology company Alibaba Cloud in collaboration with Alkhidmat. A total of 258 young men and women from Karachi Region participated in the Grand AI Hackathon. The participants who took part in the competition returned to Karachi from Islamabad yesterday. A total of 16,000 young people from across the country registered for the competition, and 12,000 projects were selected, including 430 from Karachi.

CEO Alkhidmat Karachi Naveed Ali Baig and Executive Director Rashid Qureshi congratulated the young participants from Karachi Region on their achievements. In the national finals, Alkhidmat Karachi Region secured third place overall, while its participants also won first and second positions in several competition tracks. Their achievements included the following awards:

Muhafiz AI Project: Muhammad Shafiullah Khan, Aman Khan Lodhi and Sagar Kumar secured second runner-up position, winning .US$2,000

Open Innovation: Riyaz Mahmood and Mahmood Younus won US$2,000.

Mashwara AI Project - Urdu and Regional Languages Track Champion: Muhammad Haris Awan won US$2,000.

Smart Agriculture: Sheikh Muhammad Ahmed and Muhammad Mustafa Shehzad secured the runner-up position, winning US$500.

Economic Resilience Project - Special Award: Muhammad Ahmed Rayan, Sameer Ahmed and Syed Fawad Haider Chaudhry won US$1,000.

NetFlow.AI - Young Innovator Special Award: Qamar-uz-Zaman, Moez Ahmed and Muhammad Khalid won US$1,000.

Healthcare - Medinova AI Track Runner-up: Abdul Rafi and Muhammad Irfan won US$500.

Sehat Saath Project: Arun Kumar won US$2,000.

Congratulating the young participants on their remarkable achievements, CEO Alkhidmat Karachi Naveed Ali Baig said that Karachi's youth were talented and knew how to demonstrate their abilities. He said Alibaba Cloud had organized AI hackathons around the world, and the event held in Pakistan in collaboration with Alkhidmat was the country's first and largest AI hackathon. He further revealed that Alibaba Learning Centres were being established in collaboration with Alkhidmat. Centres had already been set up in Karachi and Lahore, where formal training in cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) would begin.