General Services Administration Technology Transformation Service (TTS) invites interested business entities and academic institutions to participate in the Applied AI Challenge being conducted between April and July 2022. We aim to engage eligible U.S.-based companies and organizations with particular emphasis on startup and leading edge technology companies. In addition, we encourage participation from large and small enterprises, women-owned, minority-owned, small disadvantaged, and service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses.
TTS offers this competition to quickly identify, demonstrate, test, and acquire promising new AI technology. The Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge exists to accelerate the use of AI tooling related to COVID-19 pandemic and the societal and environmental problems that relate to it. TTS will provide an opportunity for both traditional and nontraditional large and small business entities to submit their white papers to address civilian agency needs. TTS will also provide federal employees subject matter experts with an opportunity to evaluate these disruptive, innovative approaches and technologies to support new capabilities.
Up to 16 finalists, with up to four from each market segment (Unified Platforms, Computer Vision Engines, Natural Language Processing Engines, and General AI Functions) will be selected to participate in the Applied AI Challenge Industry Day. Following the prototype demonstration at Industry Day, four winners (one from each market segment) will be selected to receive a $12,500 prize award.
Purpose
The challenge intends to assist agencies with adoption of AI and related technologies to better serve the American people. This goal is achievable through a broad and open challenge encouraging out-of-the-box solutions, along with opportunities for participants to demonstrate a direct application of promising AI technologies.
We seek AI technologies that expand opportunities for new business processes and service delivery. Participants are encouraged to consider how their white paper addresses AI within the following focus areas:
- Climate and the environment – including weather prediction (near-term and long-term), flood prediction, disaster prediction and management, and climate modeling.
- Pandemic preparedness – including drug discovery, disease surveillance and testing, and supply chain management.
- Infrastructure – including sanitation and clean water, waste management, road maintenance, and energy management and smart grids.
- Equity – including assistive technology, and agriculture innovations for food security.
Submissions demonstrating useful application of AI targeted towards civilian agency missions, but outside of the identified focus areas will be considered.
Problem Statement
AI technologies are advancing quickly and the federal government is committed to leveraging the power of innovative and novel AI-based solutions. We seek to improve public service quality through the adoption of AI software and systems. Throughout this challenge, we encourage submitters to creatively apply AI tools across a variety of use cases that may include augmenting complex decision making, improving response times, increasing access to services, and other high-value AI areas.
Submitters should submit a white paper outlining potential benefits to civilian agencies, software integrations, sample AI results datasets, and industry use cases. Submissions must clearly articulate how their white paper addresses one or more of the defined market segments below:
- Unified Platforms
- AI platforms providing a multi-functional AI solution. These platforms enable integration with a broad spectrum of data sources, AI / Machine Learning (ML) models, and AI application development, as well as provide analytics capabilities.
- Computer Vision Engines
- AI tools capable of acquiring, processing, and understanding digital images to return data for further analysis. Examples include satellite drought analysis, object detection, event detection, and image restoration.
- Natural Language Processing Engines
- AI tools capable of analyzing and processing natural language communications to assess content. Examples include optical character recognition, speech recognition, automated summarization, document AI analysis, translation, and language understanding.
- General AI Functions
- AI tools capable of assessing market risk, historical simulations, and operational risks. Examples include systems with automatic detection of anomalies or recommendations associated with projections/forecasting, business value, underwriting, leasing, compliance, and purchasing.
White papers submitted as part of the challenge will be openly shared with federal employees to increase adoption of available tools and approaches; we expect this information sharing to continue with challenge finalists presenting their prototype during the Applied AI Challenge Industry Day. Finalists for the Applied AI Challenge will be required to submit a prototype and present their AI application during the Applied AI Challenge Industry Day.
Awards:- $50,000
Deadline:- 17-05-2022
