Makkah Programming and AI Days Challenge Winners

9/16/2021

His Royal Highness Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, Advisor to the Custodian of the Two Mosques and Governor of Makkah Region, presented awards to 4 KGSP students for 1^st place in the ‘Makkah Days for Programming and Artificial Intelligence Challenge’ this June.

The ‘Challenge’ was one of the leading initiatives of the Makkah Digital Projects Exhibition, which opened on June 9^th at the Jeddah Dome.  Under the theme of ‘How to set an example in the digital world,’ students were tasked with developing ideas for applications and programs to support digital transformation in the Kingdom in the fields of Hajj and Umrah, tourism, entertainment, and other services.

Ali Al Bazroun (senior) and Hassan Boukhamseen (junior) of UIUC, Riyadh Alghamdi (senior) of Purdue University, and Mohammad Alhamdan (senior) of Emory University, won an award in the Tourism and Entertainment field, for their project proposal, Jadoul. Jadoul is a user-friendly travel app that provides personalized scheduling, planning tips, and recommendations for accommodations and entertainment attractions for tourists.

 “We thought it might be a good idea to create a centralized platform to facilitate the planning process instead of having a multitude of different apps/websites like Yelp, Google Maps, trip advisor, etc.,” explained Ali. The platform used an AI model to continuously update the user's profile to improve the user's recommendation.

“When it was announced that we won 1^st place, we jumped in celebration knowing that we just took a small step to make KAUST, Saudi Arabia, and our team take a huge leap forward in Programming and Artificial Intelligence,” exclaimed Riyadh.

The students credited their success to their diverse background of majors, skills, and talents, allowing them to work efficiently as a team and distribute responsibilities such as marketing, programming, and presenting.

“As a computer science major, it was a fun opportunity to apply some of what I learned in school and what I learned outside of school in coding. But our team, which was more diverse in majors, pooled in our knowledge together to achieve our final project,” Mohammad Alhamdan stated.

Regarding the successful outcome, Mohammad added, “I believe our team won 1^st place because of how skilled in teamwork we were as KGSP students. I also learned that an idea alone will not win you the competition, but explaining its feasibility and revealing it to the audience will make the idea worth spreading."

The four KGSP students, along with the winners of the Services field and Hajj and Umrah field, won a prize of 20,000 riyals. They were honored by His Royal Highness Prince Khaled Al Faisal, Advisor to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and Governor of Makkah Province. He was in attendance at the Program's closing ceremony held on June 15^th.

Over 90 students from 11 universities in the governorates of the Makkah Al-Mukarramah region participated in the exciting event, which also included information sessions about digital media, advertising, and capabilities and exposure to specialists and academics in the technology, software, and artificial intelligence fields.

The four students were encouraged to attend the 3-day Challenge by Dr. Walid Abediseid, Academic Development Specialist for the KGSP, and Lu Xu, KGSP Scholarship Officer, while spending their summer participating in research at the KAUST campus as part of their KGSP summer enrichment program.

             
                                                            
                   Ali Albazroun (left), Mohammad Alhamdan (center), Hassan Boukhamseen (right), Riyahd Alghamdi (bottom)