Award Ceremony @IBM Budapest Lab

News november 23, 2018

More than 2500 Students, 10 Countries, over 50 Finalists and the winners are…

This fall, iLex Systems Zrt and IBM have launched a regional chatbot development competition for students and alumni across Central and Eastern Europe.

The competition had at scope to empower the young generation with new skills, to give the opportunity to competitive advantages in future careers and prove the power of cognitive and AI technologies in the current reality, especially in the most developer-centric market in Europe (1.8 M developers)

The challenge included understanding the capabilities of IBM Cloud Platform, learning to use IBM Watson Assistance Service and ultimately, creating a human-machine dialog, addressing a wide range of audience of both technical and non-technical students having, thus, a very strong educative component attached.

After iLex announced the challenge early October this year, IBM and iLex has hosted over 50 teaching workshops and meet-ups, weekly on-line consultation session in 10 countries reaching out to more than 2500 Students.

For 5 weeks, students and professors have been assisted by IBM programmers at the most prestigious Universities in the region, like: the National Research University “High School of Economics, Kutafin Moscow State Law University, Higher School of Economics in Russia, Kraków Jagiellonian University in Poland, Mykolo Romerio Universitetas in Lithuania, University of Maribor in Slovenia, University Politechnica of Bucharest, University Babes Bolyai of Cluj-Napoca, West University of Timisoara in Romania, Budapest Business School, University of Pecs, University of Obuda in Hungary – to name a few.

The top 50 Finalists and the submitted projects have been carefully analyzed by the jury members of each participating country and 7 winners have been selected based on the professional content and the real life usability as well as on the creativity in choosing the topic.

The award solemn ceremony took place on Nov 22nd in IBM Budapest Lab with the kind participation of numerous guests including Dr. László Palkovics, Hungarian Minister of Innovation and Technology, Mr. Antonio Muttoni, IBM CEE GM and Dr. Ritter Marianna, CEO and founder of iLex Systems.

“When I came up with the name idea “AI Generation” I did not think such a deep meaning will be attached to it until the end of the competition. I am proud the contest showed that the literal AI Generation is here, and that the university students, learning to use AI on their field of expertise will have a solid advantage on the market. It was a joy to behold to judge the applications, because the number and quality of the chatbots were beyond all expectations.” – Dr. Marianna Ritter – CEO, Founder iLex Systems

The partnership between the Hungarian native tech-legal start-up and IBM goes as far as 2017 when iLex laid the foundation for its new AI Service – a chatbot named LEXI – using solutions from IBM Watson portfolio hosted on the security-rich IBM Cloud Platform.

The current version of Lexi combines machine learning, natural language processing, and integrated dialog tools to shape seamless integration between iLex’s business systems and its users. After just a few weeks of training the solution, the company was ready to start interacting with clients.