The XPRIZE’s $500K Pandemic Response Challenge tasked competing teams to build data-driven AI systems that would give organization leaders guidance to safely reopen society and restore the global economy. Now that it’s ended, XPRIZE and its partner Cognizant announced the two grand-prize winners whose models will be used in their respective countries as well as around the world.
“This month marks a year since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak globally, and since then we have sought out various ways in which XPRIZE can help to identify and accelerate possible solutions for COVID-19, as well as strategies to keep people safe while mitigating for a back to normal world,” said XPRIZE’s Chief Innovation and Growth Officer, Amir Banifatemi.
The proposed solutions were to accurately predict COVID-19 transmission rates and then prescribe measures that would lead to lower infection rates as well as negative economic impacts. All teams used Cognizant’s foundational research and Evolutionary AI™ modeling as a baseline then created their models using data compiled by the Oxford COVID-19 Government response tracker.
48 finalists from 17 countries were judged by a panel of academics, pandemic response specialists, AI experts, and epidemiologists who picked the first and second place winners—who evenly split the grand prize.
First place went to the VALENCIA IA4COVID19 team from Valencia, Spain, led by Dr. Nuria Oliver and J. Alberto Conejero. Second place went to JSI vs COVID, a team from Ljubljana, Slovenia, coordinated by Mitja Lustrek.
Following the conclusion of the Pandemic Response Challenge, XPRIZE and New Jersey-based Cognizant plan to combine their resources with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to build a public platform and ecosystem for convening data and AI through expert contributions.
To learn more about the Challenge, see the video presentation of Cognizant’s Vice President of Evolutionary AI, Babak Hodjat.
