The Global Annual Achievement Awards

for Artificial Intelligence

the 1st Annual Award Winners

On the 14th January 2016 Awards.AI is very pleased to announce the 2015 Awards Winners across all ten awards categories. These annual awards are to celebrate the various achievements of the AI community in developing new algorithms, products and services across a number of different categories and industries. We also acknowledged the work of startups and individuals who’s focus on AI is advancing the field.

This is the official page listing the winners across all ten awards categories. We have had such an amazing response from people during the public nominations and voting, so much so, many categories have been very closely contested. For several categories, we have seen two favourites during the period of the voting, and have thus decided to also list a runner up for these categories. In addition to announcing the winner we have included a short summary about the winner.

Each winner will be receiving an official winner’s trophy from Awards.AI very soon, but today we wanted to list the winners so everyone knows who has won. We look forward to seeing pictures and tweets from the winners when they receive their trophy in the coming weeks.

Without further delay, the winners of the 2015 Achievement Awards for Artificial Intelligence are:

The Winner of the Best AI Startup for 2015 is

Cortical (cortical.io)

Cortical.io offers a fundamentally new approach to handle Big Text Data. Inspired by the latest findings on the way the human neocortex processes information, Cortical.io represents language with highly efficient semantic fingerprints. The Cortical.io Retina is the first semantic engine that can process terabytes of unstructured text in real time, for any language and business domain – thus enabling global businesses to leverage the value Big Text Data has to offer. The Cortical.io Retina has been recently certified as a Cloudera partner and is available on the Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS marketplaces. Cortical.io has offices in Vienna, Austria and in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Runner Up of the Best AI Startup for 2015 is

Meshfire (meshfire.com)

Meshfire is the only social media management platform powered by artificial intelligence. Spend less time managing social media and more time building valuable relationships and communities.

The Winner of the Best Consumer Application of AI

for 2015 is

Next IT and its Amtrak implementation (casestudy)

In 2012, Amtrak engaged Next IT to develop and implement a worldclass virtual assistant to engage and serve their customers in a scalable manner. “Ask Julie,” an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) on Amtrak.com, was designed to function like Amtrak’s best customer service representative – electronically, of course.

With Julie, waiting for service is a thing of the past, as she’s easily capable of simultaneously serving the needs of every Amtrak.com visitor. Travelers can book rail travel by simply stating where and when they’d like to travel. Julie assists them by pre-filling forms on Amtrak’s scheduling tool and providing guidance through the rest of the booking process. And, of course, she’s easily capable of providing information on what items can be carried on trains or helping make hotel and rental-car reservations

The Winner of the Best AI in the Enterprise for 2015 is

DataMind (DataMind.london)

Datamind is solving hard problems in sales with artificial intelligence and optimisation. Its Neuralead uses artificial intelligence to find the perfect fit between leads and agents. It analyses sales history, learning the characteristics of an ideal lead for each individual sales person and uses this to drive intelligent allocation.

and a photo of the DataMind.London team receiving their trophy

The Winner of the Best use of AI in Robotics for 2015 is

Hanson Robotics (hansonrobotics.com)

Hanson Robotics is the leader in creating the most humanlike robots with a full range of human facial expressions. We aim to bring-to-market the most compelling and engaging humanlike robots with greater-than-human wisdom, that are capable of developing a deep, trusted relationship with people.
Our mission is to create a better future for humanity by infusing artificial intelligence with kindness and compassion, achieved through millions of dialogs between our robots and the people whose lives they touch.

The Runner Up of the Best use of AI in Robotics

for 2015 is

Berkeley BRETT

UC Berkeley researchers worked with a Willow Garage Personal Robot 2 (PR2), which they nicknamed BRETT, or Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks. They presented BRETT with a series of motor tasks, such as placing blocks into matching openings or stacking Lego blocks. The algorithm controlling BRETT’s learning included a reward function that provided a score based upon how well the robot was doing with the task.

The Winner of the Best use of AI in Vision for 2015 is

Vicarious (vicarious.com)

Vicarious is building a unified algorithmic architecture to achieve human-level intelligence in vision, language, and motor control. Currently, we are focused on visual perception problems, like recognition, segmentation, and scene parsing. We are interested in general solutions that work well across multiple sensory domains and tasks.

Using inductive biases drawn from neuroscience, our system requires orders of magnitude less training data than traditional machine learning techniques. Our underlying framework combines advantages of deep architectures and generative probabilistic models. We use modern software engineering practices, and we strive to maintain a codebase and a culture that are a joy to work in.

The Runner Up of the Best use of AI in Vision

for 2015 is

Clarifai (clarifai.com)

Clarifia was founded in 2013 by Matthew Zeiler to bring the world’s best image recognition technology to market. Our first image recognition systems held the top 5 spots for classifying objects in images in the ImageNet 2013 competition. Since then Clarifai’s deep learning systems have improved orders of magnitude in speed, vocabulary size, memory footprint and have expanded beyond images to extract knowledge from all forms of data.

The hub of Clarifai’s technology is a high performance deep learning API on which a new generation of intelligent applications is being built. It enables Clarifai to combat everyday problems with high tech solutions by providing the most powerful machine learning systems to everyone in new and innovative ways. Clarifai helps users make the most of their data by making it easier to find, organize, analyze, and share!

The Winner of the Best use of AI in Education for 2015 is

Elemental Path (elementalpath.com)

The Elemental Path technology is built to easily license and integrate into existing product lines. Our dialog engine is able to utilize some of the most advanced language processing algorithms available driving the personalization of our platform, and keeping the interaction going between toy and child.

The Winner of the Best use of AI in FinTech for 2015 is

FinVR (FinVR.com)

FinVR’s mission is to change the financial industry landscape by using a unique blend of machine learning and augmented reality to level the playing field allowing all investors to operate at these warp speeds. Our artificial intelligence software called Sherlock does all the heavy lifting for the investor by sifting through the mountains of real-time economic, market data, news and social media. Sherlock alerts the investor to any number of events or situations that could have either a positive, negative or neutral effect on their investments whilst highlights new investment opportunities. Investors no longer need watch every move of the markets as Sherlock can now do that for you.

The Winner of the AI Person of the Year for 2015 is

Jeff Hawkins (wikipedia)

Jeff Hawkins founded Numenta in 2005 and published On Intelligence describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain.

The Winner of the AI Company of the Year for 2015 is

Numenta (Numenta.com)

Numenta has developed a cohesive theory, core software technology, and numerous applications all based on principles of the neocortex. This technology lays the groundwork for the new era of machine intelligence. Our innovative work delivers breakthrough capabilities and demonstrates that a computing approach based on biological learning principles will make possible a new generation of capabilities not possible with today’s programmed computers.

The Winner of the AI Application of the Year for 2015 is

Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing, or NuPIC. (numenta.org)

NuPIC is an open source project based on a theory of neocortex called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). Parts of HTM theory have been implemented, tested, and used in applications, and other parts of HTM theory are still being developed. Today the HTM code in NuPIC can be used to analyze streaming data. It learns the time-based patterns in data, predicts future values, and detects anomalies. NuPIC includes discussion groups on HTM theory, research on extending HTM, and source code for complete applications based on HTM. We welcome participation in all of these areas.

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of the Winners and Runners Up for their hard work and dedication to the field of Artificial Intelligence in 2015. We hope these Awards are a small but welcomed acknowledgement of the great work that is being done across the world by so many people and companies. There are over 900 companies working on Artificial Intelligence with several billion dollars of venture capital invested to help develop the field. It is our aim that these Awards in some small way also help to support the AI Community by sharing the great work being done with those interested in the field of AI.

We would also like to thank everyone that took the time to register their votes and nominate companies and individuals across the different categories. Without your support, these awards would not be possible, so thank you all very much for voting.

While 2015 has been a great year for AI, we are expecting that 2016 is going to be even better. We look forward to seeing all the nominations for the 2016 AI Awards which will open for voting on 1st September 2016. If you would like more information on our AI Awards please see our 2016 AI Awards page.