At the national artificial intelligence competition “Project Pitching Day” within the international educational project “EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative”, the team of Poltava Polytechnic “HoRiseOn” successfully presented its innovative project and won the first place among 44 teams from leading higher education institutions of different regions of Ukraine.
The university team included Master’s students majoring in Computer Science and Computer Engineering Pavlo Bilokin and Yehor Popov, who, under the supervision of Olena Haitan, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer and Information Technologies and Systems, presented a project “Assistant for People with Visual Impairments”. This intelligent assistant based on artificial intelligence is designed to help visually impaired people better navigate in space, perform household tasks, and communicate. It analyzes images with the help of a camera and neural networks, uses mapping services for navigation, and provides convenient voice interaction.
“HoRiseOn” team also won the “Best Coding Project” nomination based on the results of a video demonstration of their solution. The jury highly appreciated the complexity, originality of implementation, and quality of the video presentation.
The university team “TekhOrden” (“TechOrder”), consisting of Bachelor’s students majoring in Computer Science Mykhailo Kotelevskyi, Artem Taran, Viktoriia Danylko, Ivan Oliinyk and Artem Holub, also under the supervision of Olena Haitan, became a finalist in the competition. In the “Best Coding Project” nomination, this team was among the top five.
“TekhOrden” (“TechOrder”) presented FaceIDea, an innovative face recognition system designed for flexible, fast and affordable security monitoring and control. The system is based on a Python application that uses InsightFace to detect faces with high accuracy and generate their vector representations. A key feature of FaceIDea is its auto-learning elements, which simplify the face database administration by automatically grouping unknown visitors and suggesting that they be added to the system.
The competition was the culmination of the DTTI (The Deep Tech Talent Initiative) artificial intelligence training program organized by Junior Achievement Ukraine under the sponsorship of the European Union.
The Deep Tech Talent Initiative training program combines the use of artificial intelligence and programming with elements of entrepreneurship and project management. It includes 23 training modules in two areas: coding (52 hours) and non-coding (32 hours). Poltava Polytechnic chose the coding direction for both teams, focusing on using computer vision to solve real problems.
The final of the competition was carefully organized and consisted of three rounds:
“Classic Pitching”: the teams presented their projects, and the use of AI, innovation, clarity of presentation, and quality of answers were evaluated. Both teams of Poltava Polytechnic successfully passed to the second round.
“Knockout”: the teams competed in a duel format, identifying the weaknesses of their opponents and asking tricky questions. Stress tolerance, communication skills, and the ability to give reasoned answers were assessed. Both university teams confidently made it to the final round.
“Final Pitch”: the practicality and potential of the projects were assessed. The teams answered complex questions from the jury, which pointed to areas for further work and improvement.
According to the results of jury’s voting, “HoRiseOn” achieved a convincing victory, and “TekhOrden” (“TechOrder”) took a worthy place. “For us, it is not just a victory, it is a confirmation that a new generation of engineers is being formed at Poltava Polytechnic, who can think globally and act decisively,” said Olena Haitan, the team’s coach.
The winners – Pavlo Bilokin, Yehor Popov, and their coach Olena Haitan – were invited to Kyiv to participate in the national youth entrepreneurship event “Youth Business Day”. This is an educational event that brings together presentations of the best student projects in the field of entrepreneurship.
“The best thing a university can give you is the freedom to create. We didn’t just study, we made a product that was recognized at the national level,” said student Yehor Popov.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to “Junior Achievement Ukraine” for giving students the opportunity to learn the basics of artificial intelligence and try their hand at creating a startup to solve a real social problem.
We sincerely congratulate “HoRiseOn” on their victory and “TekhOrden” (“TechOrder”) on their successful passage to the final of the competition! We wish both teams further creative success and confident victories in the future.
It should be recalled that Kateryna Kasian, a student of Poltava Polytechnic, is the winner of the All-Ukrainian competition of scientific works “Healthy Child – Healthy Nation”.
Media Center of
National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic”
