CA-XPRIZE
23.6.2021 19:32:08 CEST | Business Wire | Press release
XPRIZE , the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, and IBM Watson , IBM’s AI technology for business, today announced the Grand Prize Winner in the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE Challenge . First launched in 2016, the five-year global competition looked to accelerate adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and spark creative, innovative and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable to solve societal grand challenges.
Winning first place honors is Zzapp Malaria , in second place is Aifred Health , followed by Marinus Analytics . These finalists were selected out of a pool of 10 semifinalists following presentations of their solutions to a panel of judges during an event held at TED headquarters in New York City last year. A $3 million grand prize, $1 million second place prize, and $500k third place prize will be awarded to the teams. In total, over 150 teams throughout the world joined the competition.
"After five years of hard work and dedication, XPRIZE is thrilled to announce Zzapp Malaria as the grand prize winner of IBM Watson AI XPRIZE,” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE. “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.”
"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.”
Based out of Tel Aviv, Israel, Zzapp Malaria is committed to malaria elimination. The team’s AI technology is geared towards tackling the main challenges faced by malaria elimination campaigns by creating custom models, built with tools like IBM Watson Studio for Cloud Pak for Data, to predict the number of small water bodies caused by weather, enabling it to optimize the timing for launching larviciding operations.
- Marinus Analytics (based out of Pittsburgh, PA): A woman-owned company founded in 2014 out of Carnegie Mellon Robotics that is driven by a single social mission: To fight human trafficking. Their solution, Traffic Jam, is a suite of analytics tools that saves hours and sometimes days of investigative time to find traffickers and recover victims by quickly turning big data into actionable intelligence. Marinus Analytics has used IBM Watson Discovery and IBM Watson Assistant to extend their Traffic Jam application, aiding investigation into financial fraud and the illicit flow of proceeds to international crime groups.
- Aifred Health (based out of Montreal, Canada): A digital health company focused on clinical decision support in mental health, starting with depression. The team’s solution uses AI to learn from thousands of patients to help tailor treatment, reducing the time it takes for a patient to reach remission. IBM Watson Health is providing Aifred Health with millions of records of observational depression data to improve their ML models.
To determine the winner, XPRIZE AI convened a global jury of representatives from around the world. The jury evaluated each team based on their performance in the following four dimensions: achieved technical impact, evidenced real-world impact, scalability of real-world impact, and ethics and safety.
The winning teams were announced today in partnership with WIRED during the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE’s AI For Good fireside chat featuring Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE, and Seth Dobrin, IBM’s Chief AI Officer. The two discussed the challenge and the importance of AI for the future of humanity. As part of their partnership with WIRED, XPRIZE opened up a public vote for the Most Inspiring Team, and Zzapp Malaria was selected as the winner. You can watch the full fireside chat and view additional content via WIRED’s content hub linked here.
About XPRIZE
XPRIZE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is the global leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges. Active competitions include the $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal, $15M XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE and $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling. For more information, visit xprize.org.
About IBM Watson
Watson is IBM’s AI technology for business, helping organizations to better predict and shape future outcomes, automate complex processes, and optimize employees’ time. Watson has evolved from an IBM Research project, to experimentation, to a scaled, open set of products that run anywhere. With more than 40,000 client engagements, Watson is being applied by leading global brands across a variety of industries to transform how people work. To learn more, visit: https://www.ibm.com/watson .
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210623005848/en/
Link:
About Business Wire
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
FPT Named in Forrester’s The SAP Services Landscape Report30.9.2026 05:00:00 CEST | Press release
Global technology corporation FPT has been included among the notable providers in The SAP Services Landscape, Q3 2026, published by Forrester Research, Inc. The report provides an overview of SAP services providers, examining their market focus, geographic presence, and business specializations to support enterprises in evaluating potential technology partners. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260929359531/en/ The report includes FPT as a systems integrator with an Asia Pacific geographic focus and an industry focus spanning financial services and insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing. FPT identified SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM) as its three primary extended business scenario focus areas, what FPT believes reflects its emphasis on modernizing core enterprise systems and enabling more integrated, data-driven operations. Building on mor
SES Successfully Prices €500 million Eurobond30.9.2026 04:41:00 CEST | Press release
NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO OR TO ANY PERSON LOCATED OR RESIDENT IN, OR AT ANY ADDRESS IN, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ITS TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS (INCLUDING PUERTO RICO, THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS, GUAM, AMERICAN SAMOA, WAKE ISLAND AND THE NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS), ANY STATE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (THE UNITED STATES) OR TO ANY U.S. PERSON (AS DEFINED IN REGULATION S OF THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933, AS AMENDED (THE SECURITIES ACT)) OR IN OR INTO ANY JURISDICTION WHERE IT IS UNLAWFUL TO RELEASE, PUBLISH OR DISTRIBUTE THIS ANNOUNCEMENT (SEE “OFFER AND DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTIONS” BELOW). SES today announced the successful launch and pricing of a bond offering in which the company has agreed to sell senior unsecured fixed rate notes due in 2031 for a total amount of EUR 500 million. The new notes will bear a coupon of 5.625% and were priced at 99.667% of their nominal value. SES is rated Ba1 (stable) and BBB- (
Murata Begins Mass Production of World’s Smallest 0201-inch Size Three-Terminal Low-ESL MLCCs30.9.2026 04:00:00 CEST | Press release
New series cuts mounting area by approximately 64%, supporting high-performance smartphones and wearables Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (TOKYO: 6981) (ISIN: JP3914400001) has begun mass production of the LLD series, the world’s smallest* three-terminal low-equivalent series inductance (ESL) multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC). Measuring just 0201-inch size (0.6 × 0.3 mm), the new products reduce mounting area by approximately 64% compared with Murata’s previous smallest 0402-inch size (1.0 × 0.5 mm), freeing up valuable PCB space in compact devices such as smartphones and wearables. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260929596419/en/ [Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd.] Three-Terminal Low-ESL MLCCs As smartphones and wearables incorporate increasingly powerful ICs, maintaining a stable power supply becomes more challenging. High-speed operation causes current demand to change rapidly, which can lead to fluctuations
Lattice to Showcase AI-Driven Low Power FPGA Innovation at FPGA Horizons Conference29.9.2026 22:00:00 CEST | Press release
Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ: LSCC), the low power programmable and platform firmware leader, today announced its participation in the upcoming FPGA Horizons conference, taking place on October 6 – 7, 2026 in London. As part of the conference’s technical program, Lattice will deliver a Tech Talk presentation and a hands-on workshop, and host a demo showcase focused on how its low power FPGA solutions are advancing AI at the edge. Who: Lattice Semiconductor What / When (GMT+2): Oct. 6, 2026 Demo showcase including Lattice Holoscan Sensor Bridge solution and Lattice Prompt™ AI-driven FPGA design tool Tech Talk (10:10 – 10:30 a.m.), Shaw Theater: Practical Security Fundamentals for FPGA Engineers Oct. 7, 2026 Workshop (1:30 – 4:40 p.m.), Hyde Park room Lattice Nexus™-based FPGA hands-on Lattice Prompt™ agentic AI workflow Where: FPGA Horizons Conference, Pullman London St Pancras, Euston Road, London NW1 FPGA Horizons is a UK-based conference for FPGA industry specialists. Supporting Res
NetApp Delivers Secure, Zero-Copy Data Activation for the Agentic Enterprise29.9.2026 19:30:00 CEST | Press release
Enterprises will be empowered to accelerate AI innovation to machine speed NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today announced new capabilities that enable enterprises to accelerate their adoption of agentic AI with secure, in-place, zero-copy data activation. The heterogeneous metadata capability of NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE) helps organizations discover, understand, govern, and operationalize data where it lives, while an expanded integration with Commvault connects the NetApp Platform with Commvault recovery orchestration workflow to help customers detect attacks earlier and recover cleaner data faster. As AI agents move from experimentation into production, enterprise data infrastructure has become a critical business dependency. Agents can read, retrieve, and act on data at machine speed, but most enterprise data estates were built for human-paced workflows: fragmented across file, object, cloud, on-premises, and sovereign environments; governed
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom