The TIEC, part of Egypt's Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), announced on Tuesday in a live broadcast on TIEC social media pages the winners of IbTIECar 2019. IbTIECar is an annual competition for university students' graduation projects and held in cooperation with multinational and local tech companies and affiliate bodies of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. The competition honours this year's outstanding graduation projects of senior students enrolled in ICT faculties where 15 projects from 11 universities, won IbTIECar awards in various trending tech fields, with total prizes amounting to 180,000 Egyptian pounds ($11,398). The winners are also given advantage of undertaking three-month free training in TIEC Accelerators exist in 5 different governorates across Egypt including Giza, Alexandria, Assiut, Mansoura, and Minya, in addition to circulating their graduation projects within the ICT community. During the meeting, Hala El-Gohary, CEO of ITIDA, confirmed that the majority of the agency's programmes are geared towards building human capital and developing digital skills to enabling young people to harness disruptive technologies and serving the growing demand for these skills, driven by both the local and multinational tech companies investing in Egypt. ITIDA powers a series of initiatives that focus on fostering and stimulating tech innovation and spreading a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among the youth to create a generation of entrepreneurs capable of creating innovative digital solutions that address societal challenges, El-Gohary added. For his part, Dr. Hossam Osman, TIEC's Director and Vice President of ITIDA, applauded the graduation projects with creative ideas presented by the students during the competition. He praised the role and the efforts exerted by the sponsors, both in terms of providing cash prizes or giving technical consultation to the students in the specialised projects. Othman explained that the center stimulates and supports the whole chain of entrepreneurship. He briefed the students and graduates on the center's various programs that will help them turn their ideas success stories that have been able to attract huge investments. The rivalry focused on eight of trending and disruptive technologies like IC design, blockchain, IoT for smart cities, IoT for smart cities, virtual reality VR, augmented reality AR, extended reality XR, mobile apps, federated machine learning, and distributed data, artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), 5G networks, 5G networks, and communications technology trends. The sponsors of this version of the competition included Huawei, Egypt's National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA), and DELL EMC². IbTIECar innovation competition started in 2012, bringing the total projects submitted after its eighth year in 2019 to 1,114 advanced ideas, 881 advanced projects, and 170 winning projects/teams with total financial awards of 1,230,000 pounds.
