Mastercard Labs, SAP, SoapBox Labs and INFANT Research were among the companies that were honoured at the AI Awards 2019 ceremony. The event were held in Dublin and it recognized research and development in innovative solutions using AI technology.

The awards in their second year were held at the Gibson Hotel in Dublin and was organised by the non-profit, AI Ireland with support from Microsoft, and Alldus International. The awards will also be further supported by the IDA Ireland, Alldus, ISG, McKesson, Mazars, Mason Hayes Curran, the ADAPT Centre and GeoDirectory.

“The pace of innovation in AI is significant and the AI Awards have grown to highlight the bold, creative and scalable approach by Irish companies to AI. This approach reflects Microsoft’s mission to empower every individual and organisation on the planet to achieve more, and we are committed to achieving this in an ethical, responsible, and transparent way. This year’s winners demonstrate the positive impact that AI can bring to society and to industries like finance, healthcare, and education. Through our support of this year’s AI Awards, we can celebrate organisations in Ireland who are developing exciting innovations that have global impact,” stated Cathriona Hallahan, General Manager, Microsoft Ireland.

The winners

2019 Best Use of AI in Sector

SoapBox Labs (MSFT) - for its work on developing speech recognition technology for children. SoapBox's plug and play API makes it easy for businesses to voice enable their products. Its 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. SoapBox Labs has recently announced a partnership with Florida State University on a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative called Reach Every Reader. SoapBox Labs' technology has been chosen as the assessment tool for the Reach Every Reader project which is a hugely prestigious win and affirmation of its best in class technology

2019 Best Application of AI in a Large Enterprise

Mastercard Labs - for Duka Connect, a Mobile Point of Sale (mPoS) solution for small merchants in emerging markets. Mastercard Labs has developed a deep learning computer vision model that can recognise and distinguish between the hundreds of different products. The solution works by allowing the shopkeeper to pass the customer’s products in front of the handset’s camera, the images from the camera are passed to the computer vision model, which classifies the images to identify the product, ultimately allowing the product to be added to the customer’s basket.

2019 Best Use of AI in a Consumer/Customer Service Application

SAP - for its Business Operations and Self-Healing (BoSh), 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. Utilising concepts such as sentiment analysis, natural language processing, search/recommendation algorithms and robotic process automation, SAP has created an effective assistant for end users and service helpdesk members.

2019 Best Application of AI in an Academic Research Body

Infant Centre, University College Cork - for its work using deep learning to detect neonatal seizure detection. INFANT is a uniquely multidisciplinary, patient-focused, research and innovation centre, headquartered at University College Cork. It has 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. Currently detection is only possible through analysing electroencephalograms (EEG). Under normal NICU conditions, less than 10% of seizures are detected.

2019 Best Application of AI in a Start-up

Telenostic - for its work on deep learning or convolution neural networks (CNNs) to accurately model and predict Parasitic Infections (PI) within animals. Parasitic infections (PI) effect all animals globally. The economic cost of PI's is estimated to be 10's 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. This will also allow treatment decisions to be made quickly allowing for proactive measures to be taken and preventing the infection from growing within the host and possibly to other members of the herd.

2019 Best Application of AI in a Student Project

Ciaran O'Mara, University of Limerick - for his work on Machine Learning Based Traffic Network Analysis Tool, using AI for traffic management. 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.

2019 Best Use of RPA & Cognitive

ESB - for using AI to optimise its rollout of smart meter technology. Utilising Computer Vision and Machine Learning, the ESB ensures that its new smart meters are safely and correctly installed. The ESB 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.

Mark Kelly, Founder of AI Ireland & Chief Customer Officer at Alldus, commented: “The breadth of innovation recognised in these awards demonstrates that Irish organisations can deliver global impact through cutting edge AI research. In our second year, we have seen these awards flourish. It reinforces the need for Ireland to develop a robust national AI strategy in line with the EU.”

Founded in 2018, the AI Awards are part of AI Ireland, a Not for Profit Business which runs a number of community websites and monthly meetups supporting the area of Data Science, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence in Ireland.