While visiting the beach two years ago, Gozde Gozutok remembers seeing a major wildfire break out in the distance of Çeşme, Turkey, bordering the Aegean Sea. This event made a deep impression on Gozde. “I wanted to find a solution,” she recollects. It then ended up being the catalyst for her and two teammates, including Ozge Ozkaya, to develop an AI-driven system to tackle this issue.

“The goal for the project,” Ozge explains, “is to identify the wildfire risk for the given areas to inform the authorities to be prepared for wildfire activity.” The data for their model didn’t exist in Turkey, but that didn’t stop them. The team spent two months scraping the information they needed —on soil pH, humidity and temperature, among other data points—from the web. After testing, it was found to have 80% accuracy. Feasibly, if the accuracy as improved further, such a model could eventually spot arson through simple deduction, Ozge adds.

Given the volatile weather patterns seen globally that will only become more frequent with global warming, the applications of their innovation is wide reaching. And the launch pad for it was the Samsung Innovation Campus. Kickstarted by Samsung Electronics in 2013, these programmes nurture young people like Gozde and Ozge, developing their capabilities in advanced technologies by offering theoretical and hands-on training. The programmes have since expanded to 35 countries around the world, benefitting some 120,000 students since 2019 when the programmes were relaunched under its present name.

What drove the launch of Samsung Innovation Campus in Turkey the first place? Tech talent is sorely needed across the world, and the country is no exception. According to global workforce solutions company ManpowerGroup, three in four employers in Turkey can’t find the people with the tech skills they need. Despite this shortage, the tech startup scene and entrepreneurship in Turkey is still booming—so the potential is clearly there.

More broadly, the world is also facing competing, complicated and pressing issues, from the devastation of climate change, to economic uncertainties, to natural resources constraints. New kinds of problems necessitate new kinds of solutions. Samsung Innovation Campus hopes, in part, to ready students to instigate these.

In Turkey, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, the Middle East Technical University (METU) and Istanbul Technical University, the campus brings on 25 applicants aged 18-29 each year. Each cohort is shortlisted out of thousands of applicants. The programme first supplies students with in-depth knowledge in recent technologies—including AI and Internet of Things (IoT)—with an intensive 350-hour course. Building on what they learn in the classroom, students then design and complete a project, finally presenting it in front of judges and their peers. The programme doesn’t stop here. Post-project, mentoring and support are also provided to help the students find financing.

For Gozde and Ozge, the Wildfire Forecasting Project was the culmination of months of hard work and challenging themselves in the Samsung Innovation Campus. Both already had backgrounds in STEM—Ozge had studied computer engineering and Gozde had graduated from METU’s department of mathematics.

But even though they both had technical knowledge already, this didn’t mean that course covered old ground. Over five months, the students were taken through a “really comprehensive” curriculum. Guided by professors from METU, the students dove into learning about Python, how to use AI libraries, the theories behind algorithms and how to interpret the data, among plenty of other hard skills. “They treat us like we are beginners and it goes to the advanced level. They included every tiny detail of each method,” Ozge says.

In addition to a grounding in technical knowledge, there is also training in soft skills. After all, if someone conceives of a genuinely transformative invention, but can’t collaborate, problem solve or communicate, there is a limit to how far this idea can go. For Ozge, this aspect was “exciting and valuable”. For both, a highlight was the opportunity to learn public speaking from a well-known expert in Turkey. “This was so important to us because we never got training like that before,” Gozde says. “Also, storytelling is very important in this century. Nobody wants to listen to just data.”

The world needs tech talent, and fast. This gap is what Samsung Innovation Campus hopes to help with plugging, while empowering young people to tackle the issues closest to their hearts.

For Ozge, this course was the “perfect match” post-graduation for her to delve deeper into machine learning, and marry a “combination of technical [aspects] with social problems”. Similarly, the programme proved the ideal bridge for Gozde to further her career in this field, especially since she had not majored in computer engineering, even though she had been interested in AI and data science since undergraduate days.

“I want to continue my career in AI, so I was excited to see (that) such training was given by Samsung,” says Gozde. And her desire to work in this field has only strengthened further since the course.

There’s also another perhaps less quantifiable, but no less impactful, way the programme fundamentally altered participants’ lives for the better.

“I started to feel more confident both in my technical and soft skills. I guess I overcame my fear of speaking to the public,” says Ozge. For Gozde, the programme has enriched her life beyond just technical knowledge—in fact, a video they produced on their project went viral online. “So many things have happened since taking this course that were beyond what I could have imagined,” she says.