LSE alumnus Cesar Cornejo-Roman
LSE alumnus Cesar Cornejo-Roman (BSc Government and Economics 2021) was part of the winning team in Imperial College Business School’s online Hackathon.
Organised by the Centre for Digital Transformation and sponsored by Kyriba, the competition asked the question: how will Artificial Intelligence transform the future of work?
Teams were given 48 hours to develop and pitch their ideas to the judges. Cornejo-Roman’s team won £3,000 for developing an AI solution, “CAMILLE”, to ethically monitor employees’ productivity, focussing on individual wellbeing and team morale as an alternative to current intrusive surveillance technology.
Recounting his experience at the Hackathon, he said: “I knew I was competing with tech-savvy innovators working at the frontier of Artificial Intelligence [. . .] I landed in a dream team with four engineers and one lawyer turned programmer.
“I found myself comfortable in the technical side, with the inquisitive edge of an LSE social scientist. I would say that finding our complementarities right away was the key for outperforming other impressive teams. We hit the ground running. LSE gives you that worldliness to collaborate confidently with top performers in global teams.”
In a LinkedIn post announcing the winners, Dr Myrna Flores, Director of the Centre for Digital Transformation, wrote: “We look forward to sparking curiosity about all the amazing applications that digital technologies can bring to solve real challenges for society and organisations, enabling participants to collaborate to co-create solutions with lean innovation approaches”.
As a student at LSE, Cornejo-Roman studied Government and Economics on a scholarship funded fully by the School.
The Hackathon topic related to his undergraduate dissertation, supervised by Professor Valentino Larcinese, on “the divergent causal effects of automation on functional upgrading in advanced and emerging economies”, for which he obtained a distinction. He plans to explore this field further and is currently working on a project to understand the conditions for capturing value and rents along global supply chains, and the role played by planning, algorithmic, and AI capabilities.
Cornejo-Roman speaks of the opportunities available at LSE made possible by the Department of Government and his academic mentor, Leigh Jenco, and notes that a particular source of academic inspiration for him was an Econometrics module in which he won the 2020/21 ‘Excellence in Econometrics’ award. Taught by Dr Canh Thien Dang, Professor Steve Pischke, Professor Tai Otsu, and Dr Marcia Schafgans, the course proved instrumental in defining his interests and equipping him with practical skills that came in useful during the Hackathon.
In terms of financial support, his scholarship included tuition fees, maintenance, and extra funding during the pandemic.
Emphasising his gratitude, Cornejo-Roman added: “I can say without embarrassment that I have accrued more failures than achievements. Mine has been a long and arduous journey. Social mobility is hard as we come burdened with several economic and emotional scars. I almost didn't make it. The financial, institutional, and human support that LSE put in place for me was a blessing that pulled me through testing times. I am indebted to so many people. I want to make them proud and extend the blessing I received into a right for all. That is something worth fighting for, don’t you think?”
For the official prize announcement, see here.
To find out more about scholarhips at LSE, please click here.