A local team taking part in a Rolls-Royce AI hackathon at the AMRC says having the competition on the doorstep of the Sheffield City Region is ‘great for science and great for business’.

Data-science led agency Jaywing is bringing its expertise to the two-day hackathon, which gives engineers specialising in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics the chance to win £10,000 - and an opportunity to partner with the global engineering giant - by coming up with an AI aerospace automated inspection solution.

Rob Shaw, CEO of Jaywing, said the agency is delighted to be taking part and is fielding a team with AI expertise from across the business – from managing biddable media such as Google Ads to credit risk and regulation modelling.

Rob said: “With the hack right on our doorstep, it’s fantastic to see Sheffield bring its amazing heritage in manufacturing together with leading-edge technology to take that legacy into an exciting future. It’s great for science and it’s great for our business.

“We already have a number of AI products and services on the market or under development and we actively support many academic pursuits within the field of AI. They range from our patent-pending modelling tool Archetype, which is the first commercially available regulatorily transparent AI credit scoring tool, to AI research partnerships with Oxford University and Imperial College London.

“To breed true innovation, it’s essential that experts work together and learn from each other on new and different challenges. It’s one of the reasons data scientists join Jaywing in the first place, as the scale and depth of our team provides opportunities to work on many projects with industry-leading experts.

“The opportunity to be involved in an aerospace challenge with Rolls Royce will help us develop our innovation skills further and expand our technical and industry knowledge, as well as delivering insight into aerospace quality and safety.”

The hackathon is being hosted at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre’s flagship Factory 2050, where teams will be tasked with designing and building an AI solution that automates inspection, trend detection and measurement adjustments in the inspection process of aero-engine manufacture.

It has attracted leading engineers from across the country and is a truly international competition with a team from InData Labs, a data science and AI consulting company, travelling from Belarus to take part.

Valeryia Shchutskaya is from InData Labs, which is based in Minsk. He said data scientists and data engineers are its greatest asset and is hoping their passion will deliver a winning solution.

“We invest in R&D activities and try to foster the atmosphere of continuous learning and self-improvement in the company. Moreover, our team are very interested in the topic of building AI aerospace manufacturing automation solutions and, of course, we would be thrilled to win this kind of competition,” said Valeryia.

“InData Labs data scientists are keen on taking part in Kaggle (a community of data scientists and machine learners) data science competitions and were able to achieve some good results there.

“Besides that, AI hackathons are pretty popular in Minsk and our neighbouring countries. We always support such events here and now we would like to take our passion to the next level.”

The prize money is being offered as seed funding to help the winning team develop their solution into a proof of concept in a new partnership with Rolls-Royce’s Manufacturing Technology and R² Data Labs teams.