MBZUAI students take first-place honors at HackforSpace

A confident mindset and teamwork has helped a trio of MBZUAI students take first-place honors at HackforSpace, a two-day intensive hackathon, held in Dubai on December 10 and 11. MBZUAI Master of Science in Machine Learning students Klea Ziu (Albania), Nicolas Mauricio Cuadrado Avila (Columbia), and Roberto Alejandro Gutierrez Guillen (Mexico) were randomly placed into a multidisciplinary coding team for the hackathon, organized by G42 and Coders HQ. A total of eight teams came together to create their own Space Autopilot for a multistage Moon Mission.

Cuadrado Avila said it is the first time he has worked on a team with his fellow students, who are also part of the Optimization and Machine Learning Lab (OPTMLLAB) at MBZUAI. “We were confident of winning since the moment we signed up, however, during the hackathon we worked hard to maintain the mindset,” he said. “It is hard when you are side-by-side with such talented teams. Of course, we were thrilled when we knew that we were the winners, we also felt relief because the final score was very tight.”

Cuadrado Avila said each team member brought something unique to the table and the very nature of hackathons meant they had to work to the time constraints as they would in real life. “We really loved the event,” he said. “We combined teamwork, previous knowledge, and trial and error. We all provided our knowledge in maths, programming, and physics. Individually, Alejandro is passionate about the space-traveling so it was very important to easily understand the many terms we had to learn in situ. Klea has the ability to understand complex topics and provide good ideas of how to solve issues we experimented with. Finally, I helped with my coding experience for certain operations, and also trying to help maintain our mindset throughout the whole event.”

Fellow MBZUAI team consisting of Muhammad Hamza Sharif, Muhammad Umar Salman, and Muhammad Uzair Khattak placed third. Two honorable mentions went to Sharim Jamal, Jiayi Zhu, and Yu Kang Wong’s team; and Ashraf Haddad, Kirill Vishniakov and Nurbek Tastan’s team.