NOVA LINCS’s Team RedTWIZ Wins 2nd Place in Global Amazon Nova AI Challenge

The NOVA LINCS team RedTWIZ secured second place in the international Amazon Nova AI Challenge, a university competition that invited students and researchers from around the world to develop Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for advanced language models.

In January 2025, ten pre-selected universities began competing in the Amazon Nova AI Challenge, a new Amazon initiative focused on the development of safe generative AI applications. The goal of the university competition was to create large language models (LLMs) resilient to cyberattacks.

The challenge aimed to address a critical question: Is it possible to develop AI-based programming assistants that are both useful and secure? The final event took place on June 26 and 27 in Santa Clara, California, where the four finalist teams, including NOVA LINCS, faced off in a tournament designed to test the security of language models under adverse conditions and cyberattacks from rival bots.

This week, the winners were announced. In first place were Team PurpCorn-PLAN, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Team PurCL, from Purdue University. In second place were NOVA LINCS’s Portuguese team and Team AlquistCoder, from the Czech Technical University.

Team RedTWIZ is composed of NOVA FCT and NOVA LINCS students Diogo Silva (co-leader), Artur Horal (co-leader), Diogo Tavares, Rafael Ferreira, Daniel Pina, Iago Paulo, Henrique Paz, and João Soares, and was supervised by researchers David Semedo and João Magalhães.

“Securing second place in an international competition alongside some of the world’s leading universities in science and technology highlights the quality of our scientific research and the innovation demonstrated by our students,” said João Magalhães, one of the team’s coordinators.

Among the key insights from the first edition of the Amazon Nova AI Challenge, Amazon emphasized that the innovative methods revealed the potential to strike a balance between security and functionality in the development of generative AI. The competition particularly highlighted the importance of testing model security in long AI conversations, the value of synthetic data in improving model training, and the relevance of real-world applications for the responsible development of AI.

This was NOVA LINCS’s third participation in an Amazon AI Challenge and the third time it has ranked in the top two. In 2023, NOVA LINCS took first place in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2.

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