12 December 2017

Three students of Computer Engineering of La Salle-URL win the Challenge University of Roche worldwide

Borja Pérez, Sergi Simó and Esteve Genovard, students of the Degree in Computer Engineering at La Salle-URL, won the international Code4life University Challenge 2017 competition organized by the multinational Roche.

A total of 140 teams from five countries (Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States) took part in the contest in different phases of competition. The winning team of La Salle-URL will travel in January 2018 to the headquarters of Roche in Basel (Switzerland) where they will present their project.

In the first phase, the team competed in the 'National Challenge', in which students tested their own coding skills against other teams in the country. Specifically, from November 10 to 19, they had to program the artificial intelligence of a game's robot. This consisted in obtaining a diagnosis of a patient and a correct analysis. According to the diagnosis, the teams developed and manufactured a medication to treat the diagnostic disease. In each step, the teams accumulated points and were facing the other participating teams.

Thanks to its second position (33.69 points), the La Salle-URL team accessed the next level: Code4life Global Challenge. In this challenge, in which 10 teams participated (the first two classified from each country), the students received a real-life case from Roche to solve with Roche's guidance and expert mentoring: to code the visualization of the information of medical studies through a Form and a ChatBot. Yesterday took place the final in which each team presented its solution to a group of experts at the headquarters of Roche through videoconference. The jury rated the software (30%), the chatbot (15%), the variety of questions (5%) and the presentation (50%), and La Salle-URL was chosen as the best.

Borja Pérez, Esteve Genovard and Sergi Simó