Abstract
The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a four-year competition awarding a $5 million prize purse to teams improving the world with artificial intelligence. The competition began in 2017 with 148 teams competing to solve problems in sustainability, robotics, artificial general intelligence, healthcare, education, and a variety of other grand challenge problem domains. The first round of judgment narrowed the field to 59 teams. The characteristics of the advancing and rejected problem domains highlight the opportunities and challenges of “AI for Good” as a social and technological movement. This work surveys the problem domains and technologies of teams, details the prize judging process executed to date, and explores several case studies from the first year of the competition. The results indicate where AI researchers may direct their efforts to address problems that are simultaneously important for humanity, technically challenging, and feasible to solve within the competition timeline.
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, the teams competing to make the world a better place deserve special recognition for their efforts. Next, IBM has shown great vision in supporting such an open-ended endeavor.
The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE relies on an extraordinary advisory board to offer its insights and broad expertise to ensure maximum rigor in this competition.
• Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA)
• Francesca Rossi Distinguished Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre and a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy
• Rob High IBM Fellow, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, IBM Watson
• Babak Hodjat Co-founder and CEO of Sentient
• Neil Jacobstein Chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University
• Subbarao (Rao) Kambhampati, Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University and President of AAAI
• Peter Norvig Director of Research at Google Inc.
• Tim O’Reilly Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc.
• Jean Ponce Professor at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France.
• Lav Varshney Assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Manuela M. Veloso The Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
The judges perform the hard work of balancing imagination and critical review. They include Gabriel Skantze, Carla Gomes, Eric Van Gieson, Adam Cheyer, Robin Murphy, Danah Boyd, Ivan Laptev, Bistra Dilkina, Alex London, Al Kellner, Erin Walker, Madeleine Clare Elish, Franois Chollet, Sidney D’Mello, David Kale, Danielle Tarraf, Xiaoyang Wang, Evan Muse, Nicolas Papernot, Henry Kautz, Risto Miikkulainen, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Mark Crowley, Forent Perronnin, Bill Smart, Graham Taylor, Julien Mairal, Stefano Ermon, Antoine Bordes, Jonathan Zittrain, Michael Gillam, Peter Eckersley, Barry O’Sullivan, and Rayid Ghani.
Finally, the XPRIZE staff members Jennine Dwyer, Yvonne Cooper, Katherine Schelbert, Michael Martin, Sean Beougher, Daniel Miller, Stephanie Wander, and Ed McNierney have all been instrumental in organizing the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE.
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McGregor, S., Banifatemi, A. (2018). First Year Results from the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE: Lessons for the “AI for Good” Movement. In: Escalera, S., Weimer, M. (eds) The NIPS '17 Competition: Building Intelligent Systems. The Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94042-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94042-7_12
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