Three students of the Degree in Computer Engineering of La Salle Campus Barcelona-URL have reached the grand final Code4life University Challenge 2017, organized by the world's leading medical care company Roche. Specifically, Borja Pérez, Sergi Simó and Esteve Genovard have qualified as second in Spain and tenth in the world ranking, out of a total of 140 registered teams from five countries: Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States.
In a first phase, the team competed in the 'National Challenge', in which the students test their coding skills against other student teams in the country. Specifically, from 10-19 November, they had to program the artificial intelligence of a game's robot. This consisted of obtaining a patient diagnosis, and then analyse it correctly; Based on that diagnosis, the teams then had to develop and manufacture a medicine to treat the diagnosed disease. At each step, the teams collected points and were facing the other participating teams.
Thanks to its second position (33.69 points), La Salle-URL team has been able to access the following level: Code4life Global Challenge. In this challenge, in which a total of 10 teams participate (the first two winning teams of each participating country), students have received a real life case from Roche to solve with guidance and mentoring from Roche technical experts: program the visualization of the information of medical studies using a Form and a ChatBot.
Next Monday, December 11, the student teams will present their solution to a panel of Roche experts and executives via videoconference. For this they will be invited to the Roche Headquarter in their country. The jury will assess the software (30%), the chatbot (15%), the variety of questions (5%) and the presentation (50%). Finally, the winning team will have the opportunity to visit Roche's global headquarters in Basel (Switzerland), in January 2018.
From left to right, Borja Pérez, Esteve Genovard and Sergi Simó