Personalised make-up assistant handed top honours after lipstick demonstration, beating more than 160 global competitors in finals
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenRichard ChenPublished: 9:30pm, 6 Aug 2026Imagine a woman sitting at her vanity as a robotic arm reaches across the table, picks up her lipstick, and applies it to her lips while running through her morning schedule.
Meet Iron Bestie, a personalised make-up assistant that just snatched top honours at what organisers billed as Hong Kong’s first physical artificial intelligence hackathon, beating more than 160 global competitors in an intense 48-hour hardware-meets-software sprint this week.
The winning team included an unexpected duo: Luo Yuqing, a business information systems graduate from the City University of Hong Kong who said she had no formal coding background, and Zeng Yitao, a senior algorithm developer from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.
When the robotic hand wrapped around my wrist on the first day, it felt like I was holding hands with someone I likeLuo Yuqing, City University graduateFor Luo, who only started tinkering with AI out of curiosity a year ago, taking home the Grand MVP award in her debut hackathon transformed how she sees robotics, thanks in part to an unexpected glitch on day one.
“When the robotic hand wrapped around my wrist on the first day, it felt like I was holding hands with someone I like,” Luo said.
