The XPRIZE Foundation has announced that 59 teams have been selected to move forward in the $5 million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition. The teams, which represent 14 countries, are developing vastly different technologies, all of which demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges.

The top ten teams from round one stood out to the independent judging panel as developing innovative, important AI technologies. They were recognized at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems on December 8th in Long Beach, California and the independent panel of judges selected aifred health (Montreal, Canada) and Amiko AI (Milan, Italy; London, United Kingdom), to receive round-one milestone awards.

  • aifred health (Montreal, Canada) — Is developing a system that uses high-quality data about mental health to help physicians work with their patients to choose personalized treatments for depression.
  • Amiko AI (Milan, Italy; London, United Kingdom) — Is developing a system that enables real-time monitoring of medication use and patient health to assist healthcare professionals and empower asthma patients to achieve better outcomes.
  • Behaivior (Pittsburgh, PA) — Is developing a platform which will combine data from wearables and smartphones into an early warning system to predict and prevent addiction relapses and overdoses, with an initial focus on opioids.
  • Brown HCRI (Providence, RI) — Is developing a three-phase interdisciplinary research program to identify human social and moral norms and implement them in robots.
  • DataKind (New York, NY) — Is developing AI models which use high-resolution satellite imagery to monitor crops for disease in support of poverty alleviation.
  • Deep Drug (Baton Rouge, LA) — Is developing a drug design software that learns from the successes and failures of previous clinical trials to shorten the developmental timeline of new drugs. 
  • emPrize (Atlanta, GA) — Is developing virtual tutors for online education that will offer learning assistance through personalized tutoring, answering questions, and providing feedback to students.
  • EruditeAI (Montreal, Canada) — Is developing a free peer-to-peer math tutoring platform where a matchmaking AI pairs students in need of math help with students who have demonstrated proficiency in a specific mathematical concept.
  • Iris.ai (Oslo, Norway) — Is currently semi-automating the systematic mapping of scientific papers and ultimately building an “AI researcher” doing literature-based discovery.
  • WikiNet (Quebec, Canada) — Is developing a system that learns from past environmental cleanup efforts to provide automated expert recommendations for treating contaminated sites worldwide.

Congratulations to all the teams moving forward! We are excited to see what innovative technologies are to come from the next phase of this competition.