Awards Ceremony of the First LG Aimers AI Hackathon, a Special Stage of Future AI Experts!

The first LG Aimers AI Hackathon Awards was held at the Vision Hall of LG Sciencepark's ISC Building on October 7. As an event hosted by LG AI Research and sponsored by the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the LG Aimers AI Hackathon that was held for the first time was jointly organized by DACON, a data and AI contest platform company.

The hackathon was participated by a total of 1,745 participants and 975 teams from August 1 to August 26 to solve issues at industrial sites using AI. LG AI Research held a hackathon together with the data and AI contest platform company DACON in the past, but unlike the previous event, this hackathon was even more meaningful in that numerous trainees of the first LG Aimers who completed the LG Aimers theoretical education for one month in July also joined the event.

The topic of the LG Aimers AI Hackathon was “Antenna Performance Prediction AI Contest of Autonomous Driving Sensors.” Participants had to develop an AI model for predicting the antenna performance of radar sensors using process data. This was a very difficult topic which required analyzing the radar data of LG Innotek to predict and analyze product defects and maximize yield in order to reduce expenses of discarding products resulting from defects.

Prior to the awards ceremony, the Chief of LG AI Research Kyunghoon Bae commented, “LG Aimers is a youth AI talent fostering program consisted of theoretical lectures of prominent Korean professors and a hackathon. Its goal is to foster over 4,000 AI human resources every year. Over 1,900 trainees have already participated in LG Aimers that began in July, and about 800 of them joined the hackathon where they made outstanding achievements, thereby demonstrating the high educational achievements of the LG Aimers program.”

The awards ceremony was participated by Kyunghoon Bae, Chief of LG AI Research; Mingyu Kim, Head of the Base Technology Research Center of LG Innotek; and Giseob Kwon, Deputy Minister of Employment and Labor. Deputy Minister of Employment and Labor Giseob Kwon encouraged participants in his congratulatory speech by saying, “AI technologies are being used in various ways in our lives and industrial sites. Although its use can be extended even further, there is a shortage of experts for this. I hope that every one of you will utilize your expertise and practical experience related to AI gained through LG Aimers to follow your dream as leaders of the future economy.”

Mingyu Kim, Head of the Base Technology Research Center of LG Innotek, commented, “Manufacturing innovation and your efforts to solve greater problems are essential for forming a market with higher value. We will do our best to reinforce the global technological competitiveness so that there are more jobs for youths in Korea.” Kim explained the meaning of this event and the goal that the company and participants should work for.

The results of the LG Aimers AI Hackathon were announced after fair reviews by LG Group judges. The team who won the first place received the Minister of Employment and Labor Award and a prize of KRW 5 million. The second and third winning teams won the LG AI Research Chief Award with a prize of KRW 3 million and the LG AI Research Chief Award with a prize of KRW 2 million, respectively.

“LG Dive” team that won the first place used a Multioutput Chain Regressor model using a chain regressor based on LightGBL. The second wining team, “Hackathon”, utilized a model constructed through an ensemble of the three models of Catboost, XGBoost, and LightGBM, while the third winning team “KOPS” came up with good results using hyper-parameter tuning and stacking ensemble model.

All the members of the first-place team and 8 out of 13 awarded participants at this hackathon participated in the LG Aimers education program. The winners will be given the opportunity to be interviewed at an LG affiliate without having to go through the document screening. Many of the 13 winners wished to join LG and got interview opportunities from LG Innotek.

After the awards ceremony, Jungyun Seo, Chair of LG AI Research’s Professional Development Committee, said, “When hosting hackathons in the future, we plan to build an HR pool of about 100 talented individuals that will lead to employment. Furthermore, while this hackathon was held online, we plan to hold future events both online and offline. Offline hackathons will be linked to the LG Group’s job fair and be utilized as an opportunity to secure talented AI personnel for the entire group”, while revealing the future plans for the LG Aimers program.

LG will continue to operate various educational programs including LG Aimers to foster practical AI human resources while also directly hiring outstanding youths. Plans are to hold LG Aimers that was held for the first time this year twice a year during summer and winter breaks. It is planning to offer a wide range and in-depth experiences to participants through unique AI educational content and hackathon competitions.