Mastercard Labs, SAP and Soapbox Labs were among the winners as the second annual AI Awards took place a jam-packed Gibson Hotel in Dublin.
In partnership with principal sponsor Microsoft, seven winners were crowned at the AI Awards from 28 shortlisted applicants in industry, academic research and students among a wide-variety of fields in AI from Cybersecurity, RPA, data privacy, healthcare, speech recognition, customer service and more.
Mark Kelly, Founder of AI Ireland opened the ceremony in front of 250 people in the Gibson Hotel and also spoke about the great innovation we are seeing across Ireland.
“The breadth of innovation recognised in these awards demonstrates that Irish organisations can deliver global impact through cutting edge AI research,” he said.
“In our second year, we have seen these awards flourish. It reinforces the need for Ireland to develop a robust national AI strategy in line with the EU.”
Cathriona Hallahan, General Manager at Microsoft Ireland also spoke about the great work she has seen on display at the AI Awards and believes our ground-breakign work in AI can have a global impact.
“These awards have grown to highlight the innovative, creative and thoughtful approach by Irish organisations to AI that reflects our own mission to empower every person on the planet to achieve more in an ethical responsible and innovative way,” she said.
“The winners demonstrate the positive impact that AI can bring to different industries from finance, health to education. Through our support for this year’s AI Awards, we can celebrate organisations in Ireland who are developing exciting innovations that have global impact.”
Check out the seven winners below:
2019 Best Use of AI in Sector (Sponsored by Microsoft)
Soapbox Labs – for their work on developing speech recognition technology for children. SoapBox Labs’ plug and play API makes it easy for businesses to voice enable their products. Their near real-time assessment capabilities ensure that the products it powers are more engaging, more useful and more valuable to teachers, parents and the children themselves. SoapBox Labs has recently announced a partnership with Florida State University on a ChanZuckerberg Initiative called Reach Every Reader. SoapBox Labs’ technology has been chosen as the assessment tool for the Reach Every Reader project, which is a hugely prestigious win and affirmation of its best in class technology.
2019 Best Application of AI in a Large Enterprise (Sponsored by Alldus International)
Mastercard Labs – for Duka Connect, a Mobile Point of Sale (mPoS) solution for small merchants in emerging markets. Mastercard Labs has developed a deep learning computer vision model that can recognise and distinguish between the hundreds of different products. The solution works by allowing the shopkeeper to pass the customer’s products in front of the handset’s camera, the images from the camera are passed to the computer vision model, which classifies the images to identify the product and ultimately allowing the product to be added to the customer’s basket.
2019 Best Use of AI in a Consumer/Customer Service Application (Sponsored by IDA Ireland)
SAP – for their Business Operations and Self-Healing (BoSh), an out of the box AI platform to support business automation in the business operations self-healing space from self-help to self-healing. This is an innovative and highly effective solution for existing enterprise systems, thus reducing the burden of more tedious tasks for service helpdesks. Utilising concepts such as sentiment analysis, natural language processing, search/recommendation algorithms and robotic process automation, SAP has created an effective assistant for end users and service helpdesk members.
2019 Best Application of AI in an Academic Research Body (Sponsored by Mason Hayes & Curran)
INFANT Centre, University College Cork – for their work using deep learning to detect neonatal seizure detection. INFANT is a uniquely multidisciplinary, patient-focused, research and innovation centre, headquartered at University College Cork. It has developed innovative AI and machine learning healthcare solutions that improve maternal, new-born and child health in both high and low resource settings. 66% of new-born seizures have no physical signs or symptoms. Currently, detection is only possible through analysing electroencephalograms (EEG). Under normal NICU conditions, less than 10% of seizures are detected.
2019 Best Application of AI in a Startup (Sponsored by ADAPT Centre)
Telenostic– for their work on deep learning or convolution neural networks (CNNs) to accurately model and predict Parasitic Infections (PI) within animals. Parasitic infections (PI) effect all animals globally. The economic cost of PI’s is estimated to be tens of billions of Euro annually. By using machine learning on captured images, Telenostic will provide an in-consult analysis at a fraction of the current cost. This will also allow treatment decisions to be made quickly allowing for proactive measures to be taken and preventing the infection from growing within the host and possibly to other members of the herd.
2019 Best Application of AI in a Student Project (Sponsored by Microsoft)
Ciaran O’Mara, University of Limerick– for his work on Machine Learning Based Traffic Network Analysis Tool, using AI for traffic management. His project took a different approach to attempt to improve road network efficiency by presenting data which can be analysed and interpreted to in turn make improvements to road infrastructure, traffic planning, route planning to event planning.
2019 Intelligent Automation – Best Use of RPA & Cognitive (Sponsored by ISG)
ESB Networks – for using AI to optimise their rollout of smart meter technology. Utilising Computer Vision and Machine Learning, the ESB Networks ensures that its new smart meters are safely and correctly installed. The ESB Networks can now easily identify meter readings from the photographs – a critical requirement for ESB Networks to ensure it could respond to any customer queries quickly.
We would like to say a massive thank you to Microsoft for being principal sponsors once again and also to our other partnersIDA Ireland, Alldus International, ISG, McKesson, Mazars, Mason Hayes Curran, the ADAPT Centre and GeoDirectory for their support this year.
We also want to say a massive thank you to our judging panel for all their hard work over the past few months, all 100+ applicants and to everyone who came along on the day. We will see you all again next year!
