The 2019 AI Awards are a non-profit organisation which everybody here at Alldus is honoured to be involved with. The event was a spectacular success, with the standard of finalists and overall production value a huge step up from 2018’s already impressive standards.

Everybody from our fellow organisers/sponsors, volunteers, audiovisual tech specialists and all the staff at the Gibson hotel were first class on the day, we could not fault anyone. In total 7 awards were handed out on the day to applicants ranging from research body’s, startups, students, SME’s and multinationals.

The first award of the evening was Best use of AI in Sector, awarded and sponsored by Microsoft went to 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.

Mastercard Labs picked up the award for Best application of AI in a large enterprise, sponsored by Alldus International for its Duka Connect product, a mobile point-of-sale solution for small merchants in emerging markets. They have developed a deep learning computer vision model that can recognise and distinguish between the hundreds of different products.

German software giant SAP was named the winner of the award for Best use of AI in a consumer/customer service application sponsored by IDA. Their submission was a Business Operations and Self-Healing (BoSh), which is 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.

Telenostic won the award for Best application of AI in a start-up sponsored by ADAPT Centre for its work on deep learning or convolution neural networks to accurately model and predict parasitic infections (PI’s) within animals. 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.

On an individual level, the University of Limerick’s Ciarán O’Mara won the award for the Best application of AI in a student project, backed by principal sponsor Microsoft. 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.

The Irish Centre for Foetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT) – based at University College Cork (UCC) – was named the winner of the award for Best application of AI in research body sponsored by Mason Hayes & Curran. They have 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.

Finally, ESB Networks was named the winner of the award for Best use of RPA and cognitive technology, sponsored by ISG. Utilising Computer Vision and Machine Learning, ESB Networks ensures that its new smart meters are safely and correctly installed. 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.

Well done to all who took home a trophy, you are all worthy winners! We cannot wait for next year!