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　(Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Osamu Hata; hereafter "WAP") AI engineers from its Singapore office visited Uto Junior & Senior High School (Principal: Osamu Yokogawa, 854 students) in Uto City, Kumamoto Prefecture, on April 22 for an exchange event with the students of the science club. The students, the school, the Prefectural Office of Education, and the local community were all present. About 60 people from the students, the school, the Prefectural Education Office, and Uto City attended the meeting, where students who had achieved excellent results in a national AI contest presented their presentations at the competition, and WAP engineers shared their impressions and gave advice on how to proceed with their research.

1. zero error was achieved through repeated tuning

　Uto Junior and Senior High Schools have been designated as Super Science High Schools (SSH) by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and are promoting research and development in cooperation with research institutes and universities. The team competed in the "Competition Theme Division" and the "Exploration Theme Division. The team won first place in the competition division, in which they competed for the best image reading accuracy, and third place in the exploration division, in which each school presented the results of their research on a theme of interest.

Students from the Udo School presenting the results of the national competition

　In the competition division, teams compete for accuracy in reading the time on 10 analog clock faces. The Udo School team had an error of approximately 3 hours before the competition, but achieved an error of 0 minutes in the main event. Mizuki Kobayashi, a third-year student who gave the presentation, recalled, "We kept tuning until the very last minute. The theme of the Exploration Division was "Can AI read the words of a person wearing a mask? The impetus for the research came from a familiar problem: people who began wearing masks to distance themselves from others due to the Corona Disaster had difficulty hearing each other's words. When they examined how well they could distinguish vowels, the mask with four red dots recorded a 79% correct rate, while the mask without any dots recorded 73%.

Highly acclaimed as "applicable to business

　Bharat Singh Bhandari, an AI engineer at WAP who participated in the exchange, is originally from India. At the AI Challenge Day, a generative AI contest held in Kobe on April 18 and 19 (sponsored by ASCII and supported by Microsoft Japan), he won a special award, the "World Wide Learning Award. The students' presentations were highly praised by the judges, who commented, "The level of the students' presentations was very high.

　He commented on the students' presentation, saying, "The level of the presentation was very high, and I was very impressed. Regarding the research theme in the Exploration Division, he said, "It could be applied to business. If it is mounted on a catering robot in a restaurant, it could take orders," he advised.

WAP's Barratt advising students

　A student commented, "I want to work for an IT company in the future, so I am teaching myself programming. What should I learn from various programming languages?" Barad advised them to learn Python because the concepts behind the programming are easy to understand.

Commemorative photo of participants after the event

　WAP will be in Kumamoto in 2021, and has been exchanging ideas with Udo Junior and Senior High Schools in an effort to contribute to the local community through the development of IT personnel. I think the students will be able to open up a new world now that they have connected with people who are actually involved in AI," said Takihiro Kajio, advisor to the school's science club. The event was covered extensively by the local media, Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun and Nishinippon Shimbun, and was also broadcast on TKU TV Kumamoto.

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