Egypt’s first Quantum-AI Hackathon

We are pleased to announce that two of our students from Faculty of Computer Science at October University for Modern Sciences & Arts (MSA University), Mohamed Emad and Ashraf Hany, achieved second place at Egypt’s inaugural Quantum-AI Hackathon, organized by Nile University.

The competition centered around the analysis of a Raman shift spectroscopy dataset published in a recent Nature paper, with insights contributed by Egyptian scholar Dr. Amr Essawi, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Their primary objective was to preprocess the dataset, reducing 1377 features for encoding into a Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC), and subsequently constructing and optimizing the VQC model using Qiskit.

During the intensive two-day event, our students collaborated closely with Nile University, exploring approximately 150 different models and conducting rigorous experimentation with various structural configurations and parameters. Their dedication resulted in achieving a commendable accuracy rate of 71%, placing second among all participating teams over the 24-hour period.

This experience not only marked a significant accomplishment but also provided our students with invaluable insights into the realms of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. This experience and ground breaking topic allowed our students to deepen our knowledge of quantum computing and AI