ASTANA – The Google Solution Challenge Camp, which kicked off in the Almaty-based De Montfort University Kazakhstan (DMUK) on Nov. 18, is aimed to prepare tech specialists for the global IT project competition.
Photo credit: Askar Aituov.
The Google Solution Challenge is an annual initiative that encourages the use of Google technologies to solve problems related to one of the United Nations (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The camp was organized by Google Developer Groups (GDG) Cloud Almaty, an independent group of software developers and startup community supported by Google.
The key purpose is to help startups and developers from the Central Asian countries, Mongolia, Türkiye, and Azerbaijan to build their products and businesses with the best of Google tools and prepare for Google Solution Challenge.
“Last year, three projects from Central Asia entered the Solution Challenge’s global top 100 short-list, and one team performed at the final demo day,” said GDG Almaty Community Manager Askar Aituov in an interview with The Astana Times.
Photo credit: Askar Aituov.
This outcome, according to Aituov, was achieved through special workshops held by the community of Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) in Central Asia. He also mentioned the feedback, which participants were able to receive from last year’s Solution Challenge finalists.
Detailed counseling about SDGs is the key feature of the Almaty camp apart from the networking opportunities for the tech community and their cooperation in IT projects, particularly related to the smart use of artificial intelligence (AI).
“This year, we scaled the training sessions. In addition to technical workshops, we will assist developers with the problem statement and their approach in choosing SDGs,” said Aituov.
“During the event series, participants showed their capabilities in building AI prototypes. For instance, one of the experts developed a trip planner app in 30 minutes using Google’s PaLM API [a large language model trained by Google]. This app was developed to plan a tourist trip in Almaty and international experts used it the next day,” he added.
This May, competing with 5,000 participants, two teams from Kazakhstan entered the top 100 in the global Google Solution Challenge hackathon this May – the BeJomart project for people in need and the ReVita project for patients recovering after organ transplantation.
