Team UAE was felicitated in a glittering ceremony on Saturday following their historic victory at the 2025 FIRST Global Challenge held in Panama City from 28th October to 1st November 2025. The students brought home the Gold Medal, competing against teams from 193 countries marking a proud moment for the nation and reaffirming the UAE’s commitment to nurturing scientific talent and innovation among youth.

The competition, widely regarded as the Olympics of Robotics, gathered some of the world’s brightest young minds to solve global challenges through STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Representing the UAE with distinction, the eight-member team demonstrated creativity, perseverance, and technical excellence throughout the challenge.

The team comprised Riya Mehra (Dubai College), Aarya Parekh (Delhi Private School, Sharjah), Aarush Pancholi (GEMS Modern Academy), Aditya Anand (New Millennium School, Al Khail), Krithin Satya (Dubai College), Simran Mehra (Dubai College), Sreya Binoy Nair (GEMS Modern Academy), and Aryan Goyal (DIA Emirates Hill), a diverse group of students who together spent over 300 hours in rigorous preparation for the international challenge. Their intensive training was supported by Unique World Robotics, the official training partner for Team UAE, which played a key role in guiding the students through technical, strategic, and design aspects of the competition

Coach Muhammed Mukhtar said, “This victory is a testament to the extraordinary dedication and ingenuity of our young innovators. They have made the nation proud and shown that UAE students can compete at the highest level on the global stage.”

The team’s winning project, STASH, is an innovative biopreservation system designed to protect endangered species such as the Ghaf tree without relying on freezing or electricity. Using sodium alginate hydrogels, STASH encapsulates living cells in portable, low-cost beads that maintain viability for 3–5 days, enabling safe transport even to remote areas. Integrated with AI-based cell viability analysis and supported by a 3D-printed field kit, STASH provides an eco-friendly, globally inclusive method for preserving life, one cell at a time.

The project was evaluated by a distinguished panel of experts, including professors from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), USA, and scientists from Lam Research, who recognized the innovation and global applicability of STASH.

Reflecting on the journey, Team Captain Aarush Pancholi said, “Winning Gold was the result of countless hours of collaboration, experimentation, and teamwork. We are proud not just of the medal, but of creating a solution that can truly make a difference for biodiversity and communities worldwide.”

Bansan Thomas George, National Organiser of FIRST Global Challenge UAE, praised the students’ achievement and said, “Team UAE’s victory reflects the nation’s long-standing commitment to STEM education and youth innovation. Their work on STASH demonstrates not only technical brilliance but also a vision for sustainable solutions that can benefit the world.”

Team UAE’s accomplishment stands as a symbol of the UAE’s investment in its future innovators, inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and environmental pioneers.

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, the first fully managed service for the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS), enabling customers to deploy the AI OS and extend a unified global namespace across hybrid environments. Powered by the VAST DataSpace, enterprises can seamlessly connect clusters running in Google Cloud and on-premises locations, eliminating complex migrations and making data instantly available wherever AI runs.

Enterprises want to run AI where it performs best, but data rarely lives in one place and migrating can take months and costs millions. Fragmented storage and siloed data pipelines make it hard to feed the AI accelerators with consistent, high-throughput access and every environment change multiplies governance and compliance burdens.

VAST and Google Cloud address this challenge by making data placement a choice rather than a constraint. In this recorded demonstration, VAST showcased the power of the VAST DataSpace to connect clusters across more than 10,000 kilometers, linking one in the United States with another in Japan. This configuration delivered seamless, near real-time access to the same data in both locations while running inference workloads with vLLM, enabling intelligent workload placement so organizations can run AI models on TPUs in the US and GPUs in Japan without duplicating data or managing separate environments.

“Together with Google Cloud, VAST is building a unified data and computing environment that extends to wherever a customer wants to compute and unleashes the potential of AI by unlocking access to all data everywhere,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Delivered as a managed AI Operating System on Google Cloud, customers can go from zero to production in minutes – we’re turning hybrid complexity into a single, intelligent fabric that provides fast access to data, regardless of where it resides to accelerate time to value for agentic AI.”

“Bringing VAST AI Operating System to Google Cloud Marketplace will help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the data solution on Google Cloud’s trusted, global infrastructure,” said Nirav Mehta, Vice President, Compute Platform at Google Cloud. “VAST can now securely scale and support customers on their digital transformation journeys.”

Powering Google Cloud TPUs with seamless data access and near-local performance

Recent performance results also show how the VAST AI Operating System connects seamlessly to Google Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) virtual machines, integrating directly with Google Cloud’s platform for large-scale AI. In testing with Meta’s Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model, the VAST AI Operating System delivered model load speeds comparable to some of the best options available in the cloud, while maintaining predictable performance during cold starts.

These results confirm that the VAST AI OS is not just a data platform but a performance engine designed to keep accelerators fully utilized and AI pipelines continuously in motion.

“The VAST AI OS is redefining what it means to move fast in AI, delivering model load speeds comparable to cloud-native alternatives while providing the full power of an advanced, enterprise-grade AI platform,” said Subramanian Kartik, Chief Scientist at VAST Data. “This is the kind of acceleration that turns idle accelerators into active intelligence, driving higher efficiency and faster time to insight for every AI workload.”

With VAST on Google Cloud, customers can benefit from:

• Deploy AI in Minutes, Not Months: Organizations can run production AI workloads on Google Cloud today against existing on-premises datasets without migration planning, transfer delays, or extended compliance cycles. Using VAST DataSpace and intelligent streaming, they can present a consistent global namespace of data across on-prem and Google Cloud instantly.
• Reduce Data-Movement Costs: Stream only the subsets that models require to avoid full replication and reduce egress – cutting footprint and redirecting budget from data movement to AI innovation with infrastructure that is future-ready for the demanding AI pipelines in genomics, structural biology, and financial services.
• Maximize Google Cloud Innovation with Flexible Data Placement: Choose what to migrate, replicate, or cache to Google Cloud while keeping one namespace and consistent governance by applying unified access controls, audit, and retention policies everywhere to simplify compliance and reduce operational risk. Leverage VAST DataStore and VAST DataBase to unify prep, training, inference, and analytics without rewiring pipelines.
• TPU-Ready Data Path: Feed TPU VMs over validated NFS paths with optimized model loading and metadata-aware I/O, delivering fast, consistent warm-start performance and predictable behavior during cold-starts.
• Build on a Unified Platform: The VAST AI Operating System delivers a DataStore, DataBase, InsightEngine, AgentEngine and DataSpace that scales across on-premises and Google Cloud environments and adapts to changing business needs without architectural rewrites, enabling data scientists to use a variety of access protocols with a single solution.

AUKEY, a leading innovator in cutting-edge tech accessories, is proud to announce a multiyear partnership with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, beginning this 2025-26 NBA season. This collaboration is AUKEY’s first sports partnership, marking an exciting milestone for their expansion and reflecting their ongoing commitment to delivering high-quality, innovative technology experiences to a global audience.

Through this partnership, AUKEY will team up with the Brooklyn Nets to engage fans both on and off the court. Together, they’ve launched a non-commercial, limited-edition wireless power bank, the MagFusion M 5000 Brooklyn Nets Co-Branded Edition, combining the team’s bold identity with cutting-edge wireless charging technology.

Fans can participate in AUKEY’s social media giveaway activities for a chance to win one on Instagram and Facebook, keeping their energy flowing anytime, anywhere while enjoying exciting game moments.

MagFusion M 5000 Brooklyn Nets Co-Branded Edition

“We’re thrilled to partner with the Brooklyn Nets, a team that embodies creativity, resilience, and the spirit of New York,” said Jackey Li, CEO at AUKEY US. “At AUKEY, we power every moment with strength, endurance, and an unbreakable drive to keep innovating. The Nets share that same unstoppable spirit and we look forward to sharing that spirit of innovation and energy with basketball fans worldwide.”

AUKEY’s work with the Nets will extend in-arena at Barclays Center for the team’s home games, as well as on the team’s social media channels. This partnership represents a fusion of tech, sport, and culture and together, AUKEY and the Brooklyn Nets aim to unlock more power in every moment, from the court to the community, keeping fans charged for what’s next.