https://www.epo.org/en/news-events/news/winners-codefest-announced

Winners of CodeFest announced

Image
CodeFest 2025 Spring winners
Media caption
CodeFest 2025 Spring winners

The European Patent Office (EPO) announced today the winners of its recent CodeFest competition at a live ceremony during the PATLIB conference.

For the third public edition of the coding competition, the EPO invited talented coders and developers to create an automated system for classifying patent data based on its potential to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

In total, 68 participants originating from 30 different countries and residing in EPC member states applied to this year’s coding competition. A total of 33 proposals were submitted by the participants, of which 16 were team efforts and 17 the work of individual competitors.

Thirty of these innovative proposals made it through to the second round of the competition, and after two months of coding, six finalists were selected by a jury of EPO experts in IT, data science, AI and patent information. From these finalists, the jury selected a grand prize winner and two runners-up.

At the ceremony, the prizes were awarded to the following teams

Grand prize winners: Le Phuong Lan Tran, Arnab Saha, Ralph Ryan Hebrio and Mauricio Rodriguez Alas for the team ConfusedElectrons

The ConfusedElectrons team’s proposal uses advanced AI to sort patents by UN SDGs, create summaries and explain why each SDG tag was chosen. Their system offers a user-friendly interface to view trends, applicant data and insights. It also allows users to explore the data using a chat bot. ConfusedElectrons received the top prize of EUR 20 000.

First runners-up: Grazia Sveva Ascione and Nicolo Tamagnone for the team SDG-Concepts

The team SDG-Concepts focused their solution on the automatic generation of a silver standard for training and evaluating SDG classifiers. Their method compares rankings instead of using complex math comparisons and they trained their AI to handle multiple goal labels at once, making it more flexible and accurate. As the first runners-up, the SDG-Concepts received EUR 10 000.  

Second runners-up: Michael Mazourik and Jacques Sun for the team Suma

The two-person team Suma built an AI system made up of five tools, one of which uses a custom model to connect patent categories to SDGs. They used traditional machine learning methods, added extra data for better context and used similarity checks to improve accuracy and reliability. As the second runners-up, Suma received EUR 5 000.  

A recording of the CodeFest prize ceremony is already available.

Thank you to all of those who participated in this edition of CodeFest and special thanks to the exceptional finalists for all their hard work.

How patent data and automated data can support UN SDGs

This third edition of CodeFest challenged residents of EPO member states aged 18 and over to explore how automated systems for classifying patent data can accelerate sustainability-focused innovation and contribute to the UN SDGs. Developers and data scientists were invited to build tools to help researchers, policymakers, businesses and inventors unlock the value of patent data to accelerate sustainability-focused innovation. Sustainability is a core focus of the EPO’s Strategic Plan 2028 and CodeFest 2025 reflects this strong commitment to enhancing both the accessibility and strategic use of patent data to support global sustainable development.

In addition to their potential impact on supporting sustainablity, the winners’ solutions stood out for their functionality, usability and technical merit, as well as their creative and original use of automated systems. To help them craft their solutions, the CodeFest 2025 participants who made it through to the second round were given access to EPO worldwide bibliographic patent data, EPO worldwide legal event data, EP full-text data, Open Patent Services and the recently launched Technology Intelligence Platform (TIP).