Posted by If you are somewhat familiar with the world of startups today, you have probably noticed how startup competitions keep popping up all around the place. From the biggest competition to the more modest, every early-stage venture can now find its way under the spotlight. But despite their growing number, startup contests are for the most part still relying on the same approach. Meaning, carefully selected companies pitching in front of carefully selected juries.
By design, a competition’s result will reflect its jury’s subjectivity. Even when decades of research in psychology and behavioral economics show us that putting human bias at the center of a selection process might not be the best solution. For lack of better alternatives, humans are believed to be the best and only option. Yet when dealing with predicting the success of a startup, a jury will often provide you with as many opinions as there are members of the jury. In the end, the result is a consensus of opinions based on five minute presentations and handful of slides.
Luckily, there is still hope for a more scientific approach that does not remove the fun out of the competition! Our solution? The AI Startup Battle.
The AI Startup Battle is a startup contest powered by PreSeries, a joint venture from BigML and Telefonica Open Future_ with the objective of creating the world’s first platform to automate early stage investments. The second edition of the Battle will be taking place on Oct. 12 as part of the PAPIs ’16 conference on predictive applications and APIs. Join us at the Microsoft N.E.R.D. center on the MIT campus where you’ll see live real-world & high-stakes AI judging startups.
The first edition that was previously held in Valencia in March 2016 where PreSeries’ impartial algorithm crowned Novelti, a company that uses online machine learning algorithms to turn IoT data streams into actionable intelligence. Novelti will be presenting on stage this week and kickstart the contest for this year’s participants.
Let’s have a quick look at the contenders:
Cognii: they’re developing a leading edge assessment technology to evaluate essay-type answers for online learning platforms. Their exclusive natural language processing technology can also give customized feedback, not just a score, to engage students in an active learning process and improving their knowledge retention. Cognii’s solution is offered through an API for all online learning platforms, including LMS (Learning Management System), MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course), and more.
Joonko: The first data-driven solution for workforce diversity. It integrates into companies’ SaaS platforms and analyzes real actions in real time. The data collected is unbiased – this way, organizations can ensure that all employees get an equal opportunity to succeed in a safe, non-judgmental way. Diversity is a business problem, not just an HR one.
Palatine Analytics: Palatine helps companies evaluate the current and future performance of their employees by using AI and Predictive Analytics. With Palatine, you can collect reliable data points by incentivizing employees through Palatine’s real-time AI-driven feedback system capturing accuracy of evaluations, recognizing strengths and weaknesses of employees, and using predictive analytics to accurately predict their future performance.
Heartbeat Ai Technologies: The mission of Heartbeat Ai is to design emotionally intelligent technologies and tools to help machines understand people’s feelings, needs and motivations, and ultimately improve our emotional wellbeing. How? Language uniquely enables the differentiation of fine-grained emotions. The approach first teaches machines to understand fine-grained emotions from language and context. Then, it builds a broader understanding of human needs, desires and motivations.
Good luck to all participants!
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