For many participants, the annual Iwazhou Algorithm Competition is not just a contest, but also a gateway to the Chinese market and a platform to showcase innovative solutions and exchange ideas.
GUANGZHOU, April 18 (Xinhua) — As an important hub for manufacturing, trade and commerce, Guangzhou, the capital of southern China’s Guangdong province, is actively positioning itself as a center of technological innovation through initiatives such as the annual Washizhou Algorithm Competition.
Banzhou, located in Haizhu District, Guangzhou, is also the venue for the Canton Fair every year. The algorithm competition has been held since 2022 with the aim of promoting the integration of the digital and physical economies, accelerating the aggregation of innovative talent and insights, and energizing artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.
Now in its fifth year, the competition continues to promote high-quality development in Guangzhou’s AI industry.
The 5th Algorithm Competition began in February. The event will last seven months and consist of five tracks, including the Large-Scale AI Model Algorithm Optimization Competition, the AI Innovation Application Competition, and the International AI Competition.
The competition has experienced steady growth, with the number of participating teams increasing from 262 in the first edition to more than 8,000 last year. Teams came from many countries including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Singapore.
International participants include teams from world-renowned institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Imperial College London, and the National University of Singapore.
Kayla Kakcioglu, co-founder and CEO of Paris-based dataLobster, said on learning that her company won the 4th Washizu Algorithm Competition: “I’m very excited. The competition here is very tough. I wasn’t really sure that I would win, but it’s a very pleasant surprise. I’m happy to have won.”
For many participants, this is not just a competition, but also a gateway to the Chinese market and a platform to showcase innovative solutions and exchange ideas.
Kakcioglu said dataLobster’s participation is aimed at leveraging the competition as a platform to strengthen its presence in the Chinese market. The company provides plug-and-play technology solutions designed to help small and medium-sized manufacturing companies improve operational efficiency and optimize energy usage.
Farshid Ahsan, software engineer at Markopolo AI, expressed a similar opinion, noting that the Washizhou Algorithm Competition serves as an excellent platform to introduce innovative solutions in the Chinese market.
The competition encourages companies to submit authentic industrial scenarios and datasets as contest challenges, thereby bridging the gap between theoretical algorithms and real-world applications.
One of the companies publishing contest questions for the 5th Algorithm Contest is IROOTECH, a company that helps companies achieve intelligent transformation by applying technologies such as industrial intelligence and bodily intelligent robots.
“IROOTECH will establish various forms of cooperation with outstanding participants to jointly explore the frontiers of industrial embedded intelligence,” said Sun Baigui, Director of IROOTECH’s Innovation Laboratory.
The first contest participant, CloudButterfly Technology, which develops AI vertical models and embodied intelligence, became the contest problem publisher.
As founder Tian Xuesong noted, the transformation highlights how participants can grow alongside the competition by providing the contest with real-world scenarios such as large-scale models and industrial digitization, thereby “showing the world the strength of China’s AI innovation.”
Additionally, organizers said the competition will provide winning teams with valuable resources, including technical cooperation opportunities with leading companies and financial support. These resources are designed to help teams quickly commercialize their technical results and move algorithms from the lab to the production line.
After winning an award in a competition, startup Vocarea settled in Izhou and established partnerships with industry leaders such as Alibaba and China Mobile. Its voice model VocuV3 is gaining attention on the open source platform HuggingFace.
This contest is one of the efforts undertaken by Guangdong Province to accelerate the development of AI technology and its application. This is consistent with the state’s broader goal of promoting high-quality digital economic development. The scale of Guangdong province’s core AI industry is over 300 billion yuan (US$44 billion), accounting for about a quarter of the national total.■
