Recently, the fifth edition of the TE AI Cup Global competition, hosted by TE Connectivity (hereinafter referred to as “TE”), a global technology leader, came to a successful conclusion. Cabled Backplane team from South China Agricultural University and Invictus Gaming team from Georgia Institute of Technology won the championship. This is the second consecutive year that a Chinese university team has won the TE AI Cup competition.

IS200EPBPG1A TE AI Cup is a global platform for engineering students to apply artificial intelligence (AI) technology to solve real industry challenges. The competition aims to accelerate the application of AI in manufacturing and engineering, and help cultivate the next generation of outstanding engineering talents. The competition attracted more than 230 engineering students from 31 universities around the world to participate. Participating teams explore more than 30 TE advanced manufacturing sites around the world to understand the practical challenges faced in the manufacturing process. With the support of TE engineers and university mentors, students develop AI-based solutions and place them in TE’s advanced manufacturing facility for validation and adjustment.

“The TE AI Cup has attracted more than 650 students from around the world since its inception in 2018. Together with hundreds of TE engineers, they have created many outstanding and innovative solutions. This competition not only gives the students valuable industry experience, but also benefits TE.” TE AI Cup event promoter, TE global Vice president of operations technology Dr. Lu Yi said.

The Cabled Backplane team of South China Agricultural University, which won the champion of this competition, and TE engineers jointly designed a set of AI-based automatic machine vision inspection system, which solved the previous cable welding inspection problems. In the cable welding inspection process, due to the variety of solder joint defects, it is difficult to identify the defects manually in the past, and the accuracy is low,

IS200EPBPG1A

resulting in a high waste rate. After the application of the AI inspection system, the detection accuracy is greatly improved, and the metal waste can be reduced by 95%. At present, the system has been successfully deployed in the production line of TE Data and Terminal Equipment Division’s Dongguan Advanced Manufacturing base. The Invictus Gaming team at Georgia Tech, which also won the title, worked with TE engineers to develop a generative AI tool for patent summarization and classification. The tool’s patent analysis speed can reach 40 times that of traditional search and classification methods, greatly reducing the tedious work in patent research and analysis.

IS200EPBPG1A It is worth mentioning that the cooperation mode of this TE AI Cup is also more open and innovative. The university team and TE advanced manufacturing base to carry out transnational cooperation to inspire more inspiration. Team Gold from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University teamed up with TE’s Home Appliance Division Qingdao Advanced Manufacturing Base to develop a machine learning-based material thickness prediction system with a prediction accuracy of 94%, which can significantly reduce the amount of materials used and contribute to sustainable development. Team Gold won the third place.

Professor Deng Xiaoling from South China Agricultural University, one of the mentors of the champion team, believes that TE AI Cup provides a platform and soil for promoting the deep integration of AI technology and manufacturing industry, leading the intelligent transformation and sustainable development of the industry: “This world-class event is one of the benchmarks for the close integration of new engineering education and industry. It not only provides a stage for young students to show their innovation ability, but also enables them to deeply understand the complexity of the industry, accumulate the ability to transform theory into practical problems, and help them stand out in the AI era that has arrived.”

The sixth TE AI Cup is also in the works, officially launching worldwide on July 31, 2024. As a global industry technology leader, TE not only focuses on the development of its own research and development capabilities, but also sets a goal to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education to 10 million people worldwide by 2030. By the end of fiscal 2023, TE had reached 4.2 million people through its support of STEM education programs.