[Edaily Reporter Choi Oh-hyun ] SamsungElectronics has launched a programming competition for college students to discover future talent in AI and software (SW).

SamsungElectronics announced on the 8th that it held the awards ceremony for the “12th SamsungElectronics College Programming Challenge (SCPC)” at its Seoul R&D Campus on the 28th of last month. The competition, which began in June, consisted of two rounds of online preliminaries followed by an in-person finals round.

The SCPC is South Korea’s largest programming competition, held annually by SamsungElectronics since 2015 to expand the software ecosystem and discover top talent. This year, the event featured two categories—“AI Challenge” and “Software Algorithm Challenge”—with a total of 26 winners (13 from each category).

The AI Challenge, held for the second time this year, focused on evaluating participants’ capabilities in developing Agent AI. Moving a step beyond last year’s theme of developing multimodal AI models, participants were asked to define problems they wanted to solve as smartphone users and develop actual mobile agents to address them.

During the online preliminary round, participants implemented an Agent AI harness capable of understanding and interpreting user requests to formulate an execution plan. They also developed mobile AI agents that could remember commands and context across multiple iterative tasks. In the finals held on the 21st of last month, participants presented the design approaches, performance, and improvement plans for the agents they had developed. Kim Jeong-hoon, a student at Seoul National University, took first place in the AI Challenge.

Kim Daehyun, Vice President and Head of the AI Center at Samsung Research, explained, “We designed the problems so that participants would experience the entire process—not just implementing AI technology, but identifying real user pain points and connecting them to solutions.”

The Software Algorithm Challenge focused on evaluating mathematical optimization skills as well as problem-solving and implementation capabilities. During the on-site finals held on the 28th of last month, participants competed by solving various algorithmic problems, with Jeong Hyun-seo, a student at Seoul National University, taking first place.

Launched in 2015 and now in its 12th year, the SCPC has attracted approximately 42,000 undergraduate and graduate students to date and has produced a total of 419 award winners. Kim Kang-tae, Vice President of the Technology Strategy Team at Samsung Research, said, “I hope the participating students will use this experience as a stepping stone to grow into leaders who will drive future technologies.”