XPRIZE and Cognizant Announce Grand Prize Winners in Pandemic Response Challenge to Restart Economies Around the World

XPRIZE, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, in partnership with Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH), one of the world's leading technology and professional services companies, today announced the Grand Prize Winners in the $500K Pandemic Response Challenge. The four-month global competition was designed to harness the power of data and artificial intelligence in equipping policymakers, health officials and business leaders with the insights and guidance necessary to implement public safety measures that help keep local economies open while minimizing virus outbreaks as vaccines become more widely available. These decision-makers are encouraged to use the results, methodologies and technology from the challenge as reference on approaches to minimize potential outbreaks, now and moving forward.

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Winning first place honors is the VALENCIA IA4COVID19 (Valencia, Spain) team, coordinated by Dr. Nuria Oliver, Commissioner of the Presidency of the Generalitat Valenciana, and J. Alberto Conejero, Director of the Applied Mathematics Department at Universitat Politècnica de València. In second place is JSI vs COVID (Ljubljana, Slovenia), coordinated by Mitja Lustrek, Head of the Ambient Intelligence Group at the Jozef Stefan Institute, whose team members were previous competitors in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE. These top-performing teams were selected from among 48 finalists in 17 countries. Both teams will share equally the total prize purse of $500,000, however judges have chosen to distinguish team VALENCIA IA4COVID19 as first place due to their exemplary submissions. In total, over 100 teams throughout the world initially joined the competition.

The Pandemic Response Challenge required teams to build effective data-driven AI systems capable of accurately predicting COVID-19 transmission rates and prescribing intervention and mitigation measures that, with testing in “what-if” scenarios, were shown to minimize infection rates as well as negative economic impacts. The winning models will be made available to policymakers, business leaders, and health officials worldwide as they consider strategies for safely reopening society and restoring the global economy.