Digital Challenges Program

The Digital Challenges Program is one of the initiatives of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It aims to uncover young talents in creating technological solutions, targeting interested individuals and technical programmers, and enabling them to apply innovations and turn them into reality. The program consists of a series of challenges concerned with emerging technologies, and each challenge consists of several stages, and each challenge has its own technology.

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology launched a new series of the Digital Challenges Program on April 28, 2021, in collaboration with The Small and Medium Enterprises General Authority (Monsha'at), Taibah Valley Company, and Oracle Company. This series aims to uncover the creative talents of young men and women in developing technological solutions and turning them into tangible realities, in line with Saudi Vision 2030.

The Digital Challenges Program consists of a series of virtual challenges focusing on emerging technologies. It centers on several technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, and robotics.

The program offers participants in competition mentoring sessions and intensive training camps supervised by specialists in the technology sector to help them develop their ideas. Additionally, there are workshops to enhance the technical and entrepreneurial aspects of the ideas. The program has allocated a cash prize of SAR60,000, distributed among the top three winners with the best ideas out of two hundred technological concepts.

The Digital Challenges series begins with the Blockchain Challenge, a technology that relies on storing data through precise digital blockchains. The challenge progresses through three tracks and four stages, where participants develop their innovations and advance to the finals for a chance to win the prize. The first track focuses on providing smart solutions for the supply chain and e-commerce sector. The second track involves presenting blockchain solutions in smart contracts, automating and making them self-executing. The third track is dedicated to solutions for creative industries, with ideas that contribute to protecting intellectual property rights.

The second challenge in the Digital Challenges series is the AI Technology Challenge. This technology can learn and simulate human brain functions, solve and predict problems, and accurately verify information. The challenge progresses through three tracks and four stages, which include mentoring sessions, a training camp, and a final ceremony.

The first track of the AI Challenge focuses on computer vision by equipping electronic devices with intelligent systems capable of extracting information from visual inputs. The second track specializes in natural language processing by creating smart solutions using NLP to facilitate communication between human language and computers, enabling devices to understand and interact with human speech. The third track is dedicated to generative modeling, a technique that can predict and study solutions by generating virtual data and representing it based on the real world.