The Microsoft AI Idea Challenge – Breakthrough Ideas Wanted!

This post is authored by Tara Shankar Jana, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft.

All of us have creative ideas – ideas that can improve our lives and the lives of thousands, perhaps even millions of others. But how often do we act on turning those ideas into a reality? Most of the time, we do not believe in our ideas strongly enough to pursue them. Other times we feel like we lack a platform to build out our idea or showcase it. Most good ideas don’t go beyond those initial creative thoughts in our head.

If you’re a professional working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), or an aspiring AI developer or just someone who is passionate about AI and machine learning, Microsoft is excited to offer you an opportunity to transform your most creative ideas into reality. Join the Microsoft AI Idea Challenge Contest today for a chance to win exciting prizes and get your project featured in Microsoft’s AI.lab showcase. Check out the rules, terms and conditions of the contest and then dive right in!

The Challenge

The Microsoft AI Idea Challenge is seeking breakthrough AI solutions from developers, data scientists, professionals and students, and preferably developed on the Microsoft AI platform and services. The challenge gives you a platform to freely share AI models and applications, so they are reusable and easily accessible. The ideas you submit are judged on the parameters shown in the figure below – essentially half the weight is for the originality of your idea, 20% for the feasibility of your solution, and 30% for the complexity (i.e. level of sophistication) of your implementation.

The Microsoft AI Challenge is accepting submissions between now and October 12th, 2018.

To qualify for the competition, individuals or teams are required to submit a working AI model, test dataset, a demo app and a demo video that can be a maximum of three minutes long. We encourage you to register early and upload your projects soon, so that you can begin to plan and build out your solution and turn in the rest of your materials on time. We are looking for solutions across the whole spectrum of use cases – to be inspired, take a look at some of the examples at AI.lab.

Prizes

The winners of the first three places in the contest will respectively receive a Surface Book 2, a DJI Drone, and an Xbox One X.

We hope that’s motivation to get you started today – good luck!

Tara