- Fourth Annual Awards Celebrate Irish AI Innovation across diverse sectors
- Bank of Ireland, seamlessCARE Ltd, Akara Robotics among the award winners
- SoapBox Labs’ Amelia Kelly and Janssen’s Terri O’Donovan win individual awards
- UCD’s AI PREMie take home Award for Academic Research and AI for Social Good
Bank of Ireland, UCD’s AI PREMie and Webio are amongst the top Irish AI innovators recognised at the fourth AI Awards ceremony, in partnership with headline sponsor Microsoft.
The AI Awards supports the growth and development of Data Science, Machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence in Ireland. The awards seek to recognise how AI can be used to help solve some of the biggest, business, academic, environmental and health challenges facing our society today.
The event was organized by the non-profit AI Ireland and supported by headline sponsor Microsoft along with other sponsors: Alldus International, the ADAPT Centre, CCT College Dublin, Mazars and IDA Ireland.
“It’s been fantastic to witness the breadth and depth of the AI Award’s winners today,” said Mark Kelly, founder of AI Ireland. “As the world undergoes seismic change, the sheer breadth of AI and Machine Learning, research, development and implementation across private, public and academic organisations is exciting and shows how AI can help us embrace change and avail of massive opportunities in this new reality.”
The 2022 AI Award Winners are:
Best Application of AI in a Large Enterprise
Bank of Ireland – for the implementation of their Downstream User Table, which identifies the maturity journey of a cohort of machine learning models implemented for customer propensity modelling with the aim to offer a single view of validated, accurate and ready to use output for downstream users for a variety of purposes.
Best Use of AI in an SME
Kinesense – for their AI-centric research project, namely the Visual Intelligence Search Platform (VISP), which seeks to improve workflows for transcoding, analysing, and distributing videos using deep learning video analytics and cloud-based processing technologies.
Best Application of AI in a Startup
SeamlessCARE Ltd. – for their AI application Empathic that helps non-verbal people to independently communicate. It uses AI to interpret short recordings of non-verbal vocalisations & support people with communication difficulties due to autism, stroke, dementia, intellectual disability and a wide range of other conditions.
Best Application of AI to achieve Social Good
AI_Premie UCD – who are saving lives of mothers and babies using AI. A multidisciplinary team led by University College Dublin combines AI with patented biomarkers and clinical expertise to accurately diagnose pre-eclampsia and predict the patient’s future outcome.
AI Person of the Year
Dr. Amelia Kelly – Amelia is the VP of Speech Technology at SoapBox Labs and has more than a decade of experience in speech signal processing, ML, NLP and AI. She has been instrumental in driving the culture and approach in how they build, model and test their speech technology at Soapbox Labs.
Women in AI Person of the Year
Terri O’Donovan – Terri has over 14 years of experience in Janssen across various functions including creating the first Janssen Digital & Technology department. She played a critical role within the JSI Expansion Project as System User supporting the design, startup phases and the introduction of new technologies.
Young AI Role Model of the Year
Kevin Quinlan, ESB – for his role in role in driving analytics in ESB which could have a long-term impact on the energy system and climate in Ireland. Kevin has delivered numerous high value projects, including the Development, Planning and Reporting tool he developed for the Smart Metering project.
Best Application of AI in an Academic Research Body
AI_PREMie UCD – who are saving lives of mothers and babies using AI. A multidisciplinary team led by University College Dublin combines AI with patented biomarkers and clinical expertise to accurately diagnose pre-eclampsia and predict the patient’s future outcome.
Best Application of AI in a Student Project
Eoin Delaney – 3rd year PhD student at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics & VistaMilk SFI Research Centre in UCD for his research on Explainable AI (XAI), specifically on how black-box AI models can be explained to developers and end-users using counterfactual explanations.
Best Use of AI in a Consumer/Customer Service Application
Webio – for their own proprietary Conversational AI (NLP) Engine which specifically identifies the intents and entities associated with credit and collections conversations. This enables Webio to understand what the customer is trying to achieve more effectively than generic solutions.
Best Application of AI in Healthcare
Akara Robotics – A spin-out from Trinity College Dublin, Akara developed Violet, the first clinical-grade fully autonomous UV disinfection robot. Violet uses advanced sensing and AI abilities that allow it to traverse complex hospital environments and closely control the parts of the room that are irradiated.
Best Use of Responsible AI & Ethics
Webio – Webio’s proprietary Conversational (NLP) Engine gives a person the opportunity to speak to a trained operative while ensuring conversations remain private and that the information shared is not used in any manner than intended by the customer.