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Global Swiss AI AWard

Congratulations to Yann LeCun for winning the Global Swiss AI Award 2023! Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta, received the prestigious AI award from the Mayor of Davos, Philipp Wilhelm, on the occasion of the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024. After the laudatio by Prof. Dr. Benjamin Grewe and the award reception hosted by Pascal Kaufmann, president of the jury, the ceremonial act took place led by Prof. Dr. Thilo Stadelmann. Yann LeCun briefly swapped algorithms for music as he played a blues on cowbells together with Thilo. What a highlight! Melanie Pfändler, SRF moderated the ceremony and guided through the Q&A session where Yann LeCun emphasized that intelligence is not a singular, all-encompassing attribute but a multi-dimensional spectrum, varied and task-specific.

'Yann has been at the forefront of AI research for many years and has been a tireless advocate for the responsible development and deployment of cutting-edge AI technologies. Yann is a role model for uniting entrepreneurship and curiosity to push the edge of the unknown. While advocating for radically alternative approaches to AI, Yann pushes for open sourcing insights and tools for the benefit of humankind. Thus, the jury honors Yann with the Swiss Global AI Award for his outstanding role and contributions to AI at a global scale.'
Prof. Dr. Benjamin Grewe, Professor of Neural Learning and Intelligent Systems ETH and UZH, and member of the jury.
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About The Global swiss AI Award

The Global Swiss AI Award for outstanding achievements in AI honours the most promising and innovative individual who has impacted the field of AI at a global scale. The application process grounds a scouting process, tracing and following hundreds of AI companies in Switzerland and beyond. From these, several scientists, entrepreneurs, and other leaders in the field are profiled and rated along an established catalogue of criteria. An important decision criterion is the timeframe of the impact, which should encompass timeframes at maximum three years until a significant impact can be assessed, hence allowing young scientists and yet unknown individuals to gain visibility and become a nominee. The selection process and the jury are headed and organized by the Mindfire Foundation.

Award Ceremony in Davos during the WEF 2023
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Pascal Kaufmann (president Mindfire Foundation)
Demis Hassabis (CEO DeepMind)
Philipp Wilhelm (Mayor of Davos)

Hall of Fame

2022

‍Demis Hassabis is an AI researcher and entrepreneur, and currently CEO at DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs and a UK Government AI Advisor. After successful academic careers and computer game development, Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in2010. A child chess prodigy, he designed and programmed the multi-million-selling, award-winning game Theme Park at 17. After graduating from Cambridge University, he founded the pioneering videogames firm ElixirStudios and completed a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at UCL. Demis is a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2017 he was featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE for services to science and technology. In 2022, he won the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and in 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold.

2021

François Chollet is a French software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher currently working at Google. Chollet is the creator of the Keras deep-learning library, released in 2015, and a main contributor to the TensorFlow machine learning framework. His research focuses on computer vision, the application of machine learning to formal reasoning, abstraction, and how to achieve greater generality in artificial intelligence. Chollet graduated with a Master of Engineering from the ENSTA Paris school in 2012 and started working at Google in 2015. His papers have been published at major conferences in the field, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(CVPR), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Chollet is the creator of the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) Challenge.

Selection Process and Criteria

The application process grounds on a scouting process, tracing and following hundreds of scientists, entrepreneurs and other leaders in the field of AI in Switzerland and beyond. Selected jury members from Business and Academia conduct video interviews, analyse patents and do a deep dive into the achievements, technology developed, complemented by interviews with researchers, customers or end users. The innovation and breakthrough potential is then assessed using a four-tier grading system by professors and researchers from Switzerland’s leading universities and institutes of higher education along the following dimensions: I. scientific impact, II. timeframe of the impact, III. novelty, IV. popularity past and future, V. sustainability.

Jury Board
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PASCAL kAUFMANN
president of the jury of the Swiss AI Award, Founder of Starmind, founder and president of the Mindfire Foundation
PROF. DR. BENJAMIN GREWE
Professor at ETH Zurich and group leader Learning Systems at the Institute of Neuroinformatics
PROF. DR. THILO STADELMANN
Head of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, ZHAW
DR. CHRISTIAN HUGO HOFFMANN
AI Startup Center

Jury Members

The jury consist of experts from Academia and Business in varying constellations, covering the most important Euopean AI labs and groups.
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media

Your media contact: Dr. Daniela Suter, media@mindfire.global