Continuing to stride five years after its’ launch, global innovation competition AI XPRIZE in partnership with IBM Watson announced Zzapp Malaria as the grand prize winner for their use of AI to eliminate malaria. Their mission met the competition’s goal of using AI and scalable technology to take on one of the world’s greatest challenges.
Aifred Health followed in 2nd place and Marinus Analytics in 3rd. They were chosen from a pool of 10 semifinalists following their presentations to a panel of judges at TED headquarters in New York City last year. A $3 million grand prize, a $1 million second place prize, and a $500k third place prize were respectively awarded to the top three teams.
“Zzapp Malaria, Aifred Health and Marinus Analytics are on the forefront of AI advancement, and we are looking forward to seeing firsthand the positive impact they will have on our future.” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE.
Based out of Tel Aviv, Israel, Zzapp Malaria assists with malaria elimination campaigns by creating custom models, built with tools like IBM Watson Studio for Cloud Pak for Data. Their technology is able to predict the number of small water bodies caused by weather, thus optimizing the time for launching larviciding operations.
Aifred Health based in Montreal, Canada is a digital health company focused on clinical decision support in mental health, starting with depression. Marinus Analytics is a woman-owned company founded in 2014 out of Carnegie Mellon Robotics that fights human trafficking be focusing on investigations into financial fraud and the illicit flow of proceeds to international crime groups.
The global innovation competition drew in over 150 teams. Each year the organizers and sponsors are impressed with the submissions and the innovative use of AI for taking on global issues.
“Each of the three finalists of the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE showcase what’s possible when the power of AI is used to address some of the world’s toughest challenges,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager, IBM Data and AI. “It’s inspiring to witness how the AI technologies we developed at IBM help these organizations realize and scale their good tech solutions to drive positive societal change.”
Winners of the innovation competition were chosen by a jury of global representatives brought together by XPRIZE AI. Each team’s performance was evaluated on four dimensions: achieved technical impact, evidenced real-world impact, scalability of real-world impact, and ethics and safety.
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