[Asia Economy Reporter Ji-hwan Park] Samjong KPMG announced on the 27th that the IPL (Image Processing LAB) team from Soonchunhyang University won first place in the ‘KPMG Ideathon’ held for university students.
The KPMG Ideathon is a competition where university students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as well as business form teams to develop programs that solve real corporate problems and improve business efficiency using artificial intelligence (AI) ideas. It is hosted by Samjong KPMG and sponsored by Microsoft Korea.
88 university students from 19 teams competed with the theme ‘Ideas to drastically reduce wasted time using AI.’ To prevent the spread of COVID-19, judging was conducted via video conference, and a virtual awards ceremony is also under consideration.
From the host Samjong KPMG, Kwangchun Lee, Executive Director of Samjong KPMG Lighthouse, and Sangseon Ahn, CEO of Mrobo, participated as mentors to advise the students.
The winning IPL team presented a shopping cart integrated with AI. When items are placed in the cart, AI recognizes the products and automatically generates a list in the smartphone application’s shopping cart, enabling payment as well.
Hyunseok Yang, Executive Director of Samjong KPMG Lighthouse, explained, "The IPL team showed excellent performance by proposing an innovative idea that automatically calculates the price of items in the cart and allows payment using AI, while also aiming to implement similar functions at a lower cost compared to existing product recognition systems, thus considering marketability."
The runner-up team, ing (Jeoncheorijung), proposed an idea for acquiring high-quality labeled data for machine learning. The third place was awarded to the C-Crew team, which suggested improving meeting time efficiency using the latest AI.
The winning team receives a prize of 10 million KRW along with an internship opportunity at Samjong KPMG Lighthouse. They also qualify to participate in the international finals, the KPMG Ideation Challenge (KIC), hosted by global KPMG. The runner-up and third-place teams receive 5 million KRW and 3 million KRW respectively.
At the KIC, held in Korea this August, over 20 winning teams from various countries will gather to fiercely compete with their ideas. The winning team will receive approximately $50,000 (about 60 million KRW) in seed money to realize their idea.
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