London-based Alpha-I — a software company specialising in AI-powered maintenance solutions for aerospace — is ‘flying high’ after taking the top spot at a recent two-day ‘hackathon’ organised by Rolls-Royce.

The company (www.alpha-i.co), which builds machine learning platforms and works with some of the largest manufacturers of aircraft and aircraft components, beat 11 other teams to be named champions, winning £10,000 and a partnership with Rolls-Royce.

The teams — made up of engineersspecialising in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data science — were tasked with looking at a collection of data, ‘cleaning’ it and creating a super-human decision-making engine to develop and enhance manufacturing processes at Rolls-Royce.

Alpha-I merged its expertise in predictive maintenance with data analytics and was chosen as the winning team by a panel of Rolls-Royce judges.

Giacomo Mariotti, Alpha-I’s CEO, said the prize money will be used as seed funding to help develop its winning solution into a proof of concept.

He added: “It was a very tough 48hr. We were there very late on the first night and came in early the next morning, and I think we did a good job trying to work towards something we could achieve and squeezed in every tiny bit of detail.

“The quality of the other teams’ work was really high and it feels great to have won.

“The aerospace industry is something we are very interested in, and Rolls-Royce will be a great partner. We hope this could be the beginning of something very interesting for us.”