Congratulations to our CEMS Term Abroad students Robin Curtis, Alice Bistacchia, Kaja Bogdan and Gigi Huang, who won the Estoril Conferences’ CEMS Video Challenge and presented their video at the event on 1 September in Cascais, Portugal. The team also has a fifth member, VSE (Prague University of Economics and Business) student Artem Fedorov.
The video, which focused on ethical concerns in the use of technology, won praise from the judging panel for its innovative use of an artificial intelligence voiceover tool to narrate the clip. BIZBeat spoke with the team to find out more about their competition experience.
Q: What is your video about?
We tell a story following centuries of inventions and how innovation has been used to the advantage of the few and at the cost of the mass. Finally, we suggest that to sustain a smart development of technology, individuals and governing bodies must speak up while introducing measures to protect the most vulnerable within society.
We think the greatest harm technology can do to people verges on the dichotomy of reality versus perception. While we perceive we are not good-looking enough for social media, for example, reality tells a different story – that everyone is beautiful in their way. More and more, we see a detachment of the youth from reality, which can be seen in almost every aspect of life. We, therefore, saw the urgency to raise awareness of the ethics behind technology by exactly wearing these lenses.
Q: What was it like for the team behind the scenes?
We wanted to make the project appealing from several perspectives. We were, for example, looking for a way to show firsthand how technology’s misuse can be subtle – and only after weeks of brainstorming and trials did we come up with the interesting idea of letting an AI voice tool speak for us.
Q: What was it like presenting in front of hundreds in Portugal?
The experience of the Conference has been the best reward we could get from such intense work. Presenting not only to high-tenured speakers but also to the purpose generation – the youth – was an honour and a joy at the same time. As a result, Cascais has been – and we hope will also remain in the future – a place where ideas meet beyond people, where opinions find space to thrive.
Q: What are your takeaways from the experience?
We can say that this competition taught us three main things: creativity, teamwork and endurance. First, we learned that without thinking out of the box, we would have never been able to raise our message among our fellow competition participants while at the same time making the message appealing to the public. As hard as it may get, we learned that teamwork sometimes entails the biggest potential: sharing the good and the bad moments and pushing everyone beyond the finish line. Finally, we learned that the Video Challenge is similar to a marathon, where preparation meets opportunity, and only patience could pay back.