Swiss NGO wins Google AI Impact Challenge
As part of Google's "AI for Social Good" initiative, grants have been awarded to 20 organizations to turn their AI-based projects into real-world initiatives. The Swiss NGO Huridocs is one of the winners.
The winners of the Google AI Impact Challenge were announced on Tuesday at Google I/O, the annual developer conference.
The challenge was launched in October last year as part of the "AI for Social Good" initiative. The basic idea is that new technologies can help solve major social, humanitarian and environmental problems. With the grants, Google wanted to offer various organizations that can present well thought-out proposals the opportunity to contribute to this vision.
Around 2602 applications from 119 countries were submitted, and 40 percent of the applications came from companies with no previous experience in the field of artificial intelligence. Google reviewed the best projects for feasibility, impact potential, scalability and responsible use of AI and selected 20 organizations. The selected projects address problems in areas such as health, economic opportunity and empowerment, environmental protection and preservation, education, disinformation prevention, and crisis and emergency response.
In addition to a total of 25 million dollars in scholarships, the 20 winners will also receive loans and advice from Google Cloud, mentoring from Google AI experts and the opportunity to take part in a program from the Google Developers Launchpad.
One of the winners is a Swiss organization: the NGO Huridocs uses natural language processing and machine learning methods to extract, research and combine relevant information in laws, case law, statements and decisions. Human rights lawyers in particular can benefit from this and use the globally accessible documents to research their cases more quickly and efficiently and represent them in court.
