NEW YORK, NY, Feb. 7, 2018 – THE ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be given annually to individuals or teams who created AI applications in recent years in ways that demonstrate the power of AI techniques via a combination of the following features: novelty of application area, novelty and technical excellence of the approach, importance of AI techniques for the approach, and actual and predicted societal impact of the application. The award plaque is accompanied by a prize of $5,000 and will be awarded at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence through an agreement with the IJCAI Board of Trustees.

After decades of progress in the theory of AI, research and development, AI applications are now increasingly moving into the commercial sector. A great deal of pioneering application-level work is being done—from startups to large corporations—and this is influencing commerce and the broad public in a wide variety of ways. This award complements the numerous academic, best paper and related awards, in that it focuses on innovators of fielded AI applications, honoring those who are playing key roles in AI commercialization. The award honors these innovators and highlights their achievements (and thus also the benefit of AI techniques) to computing professionals and the public at large. The award committee will consider applications that are open source or proprietary and that may ,or may not, involve hardware.

Evaluation criteria:

The criteria include the following, but there is no fixed weighting of them:

Novelty of application area

Novelty and technical excellence of approach

Importance of AI techniques for the approach

Actual and predicted societal benefits of the fielded application

Eligibility criteria:

Any individual or team, worldwide, is eligible for the award.

Nomination procedure:

One nomination and three endorsements must be submitted. The nomination must identify the individual or team members, describe their fielded AI system, and explain how it addresses the award criteria. The nomination must be written by a member of SIGAI. Two of the endorsements must be from members of ACM or ACM SIGAI. Anyone can join ACM SIGAI at any time for just US $11 (students) and US $25 (other) annual membership fee, even if they are not an ACM member.

Please submit the nomination and endorsements as a single PDF file in an email to [email protected]. We will acknowledge receipt of the nomination.

Timeline:

Nominations Due: March 1, 2019

Award Announcement: April 25, 2019

Award Presentation: August 10-16, 2019 at IJCAI in Macao (China)

About ACM SIGAI

ACM SIGAI is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI), an interdisciplinary group of academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, software developers, end users, and students who work together to promote and support the growth and application of AI principles and techniques throughout computing. SIGAI is one of the oldest special interest groups in the ACM. SIGAI, previously called SIGART, was started in 1966. The official newsletter of SIGAI is AI Matters.

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Source: ACM