Global Swiss AI AWard

Congratulations to the Authors of 'Attention Is All You Need' for Winning the Global Swiss AI Award 2024!

We are thrilled to announce that the Global Swiss AI Award 2024 has been presented to the authors of the groundbreaking research paper, 'Attention Is All You Need': Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gómez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin.
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On behalf of the 'transformer team', Jakob Uszkoreit  will receive the award on 22 January, 2025 in Davos during the WEF. The ceremony will take place at 3pm at the Berglistutz 1.

Wanna join the ceremony? Limited places are available upon registration, here:
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'This transformer team of visionaries has redefined the field of artificial intelligence with their pioneering work. The Transformer's innovative architecture introduced in this paper has had a profound impact on AI, powering state-of-the-art advancements in natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and beyond. Their work laid the foundation for major AI systems like GPT, BERT, and many others that continue to shape industries, enhance user experiences, and solve global challenges. This award recognizes their monumental achievement, which has inspired researchers and engineers worldwide and ushered in a new era of AI capabilities.'
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 2024
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Philipp Wilhelm (Mayor of Davos)
Yann LeCun (VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta)
Pascal Kaufmann (president Mindfire Foundation)

Hall of Fame

2023

Yann LeCun, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI), is a highly renowned computer scientist celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions. Born in Paris in 1960, LeCun is characterized by an inexhaustible curiosity and passion for understanding intelligence. With an exceptional academic background and a PhD from the University of Paris, he started a career that would profoundly impact the global AI landscape. Known for his approachable personality and collaborative spirit, LeCun has inspired countless researchers and students, earning respect for his intellect and commitment to fostering a vibrant AI community. Yann LeCun's profound impact on artificial intelligence is embodied in his groundbreaking work in deep learning and neural networks. He is considered the driving force behind the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and has revolutionized image recognition and pattern analysis with his research. As a Chief AI Scientist at Meta and a New York University (NYU) professor, LeCun's impact reaches beyond academia. His work extends the theoretical level and lays the foundation for practical applications across all industries. LeCun's commitment to advancing AI has made him a leading force in shaping the future of intelligent systems globally.

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