TedAI Vienna

TedAI Vienna Hackathon:

?? I had the pleasure of joining the TEDAI Hackathon in Vienna with amazing co-judges Jia Zhu and Thomas Dohmke . Of course Jakob Reiter for the organization.

We have witnessed 7 innovative ideas addressing SDG and AI for Good:

?? AI-Driven Agriculture

?? Breaking the Menopause Taboo

?? AI Against Human Trafficking

?? AI for Food Waste Reduction (winner)

?? Trustworthy AI

?? Empowering Migrant Women

?? AI for Sustainable Materials

At PwC, we are proud to support these teams in bringing their ideas to life, which is why we offered to connect them with our PwC AI Factory to accelerate their journeys.

Panel discussion:

In our panel discussion, we explored the significance of hackathons in unveiling talents, skills, and groundbreaking ideas—not just for startups but also for large organizations. We emphasized the need for startups to focus on developing AI agents beyond just AI chatbots.

?? Key highlights from the panels and talks:

European AI Innovations:

• XLSTM (Sepp Hochreiter): Introducing smaller, efficient architectures for European enterprises.
• Liquid AI (Ramin Hasani): Proposing an adaptable AI model inspired by neural plasticity. -
• AlephAlpha (Jonas Andrulis): Unveiling a tokenizer boosting model adaptability across languages.

?? One of my biggest takeaways from the event was the development of Simulation-Driven AI:

• ?? Imagine a self-driving car encountering an edge case where it's unsure what action to take—whether to brake, turn left, or right. Currently, it selects the most probable outcome based on its training data. However, with Simulation-Driven AI powered by Generative AI, the car could simulate multiple scenarios visually, showing what would happen for each possible action. This way, instead of just relying on probabilities from its past data, it can assess the simulated outcomes in real-time and help the decision-making AI choose the best course of action. Microsoft Research is already working on similar AI simulation technology in gaming environments, which could revolutionize real-world applications like autonomous driving.

?? Highlights from Joe Atkinson , PwC Global Chief AI Officer:

• Approach to Innovation: Joe stressed the importance of not just watching from the sidelines but actively participating in innovation to avoid falling behind and better serve clients and people.
• Definition of Winning: Winning is about taking people along, closing the digital divide, and creating opportunities for both heavy and light investors in tech infrastructure.
• Opportunities in Technology: There’s an optimistic view on how technology can create differentiated value, open new pathways, and elevate the role of humans in delivering value globally.

?? A special shoutout to our Global & EMEA Market Communication team for their outstanding support: Anna-Maria Oberpriller , Joelle Nitze , Elizabeth Montgomery , Carolina Saludes and Alexander A. Miklautz .

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