The "Bot Busters" team from University of Petra's Faculty of Information Technology won second place in the IEEE Jordan AI Modeling Hackathon 1.0, a national competition focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The competition was organized by the Jordan chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in collaboration with Al-Ahliyya Amman University and Al al-Bayt University. The final round was hosted at Al-Ahliyya Amman University.​

The hackathon began with a preliminary round where teams were tasked with developing AI-based solutions for an open challenge. The submitted models were evaluated using previously unseen data to assess their generalization capabilities and accuracy.

UOP's team included students Moatasem Al-Zaatreh and Abdelrahman Al-Kurdi, under the supervision of Dr. Abedal-Kareem Al-Banna. Their solution involved advanced data analysis models, which helped them secure second place out of 114 teams from 25 Jordanian universities.

The team advanced to the final stage, joining 52 teams from 22 universities. The finals featured six back-to-back AI challenges held over six continuous hours, testing participants' ability to develop AI models under pressure.

Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology at UOP, Prof. Wael Hadi, said the achievement reflects the alignment of the faculty's academic output with both local and global labor market demands in the AI sector.​

"Our curricula are regularly updated to keep pace with the rapid developments in AI and data science," he noted. "We are proud of our students, who continue to demonstrate their ability to excel and compete at the highest technical levels."