C3.ai Announces COVID-19 Grand Challenge Winners
8.12.2020 17:00:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
C3.ai, a leading enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software provider for accelerating digital transformation, today announced the winners of the C3.ai™ COVID-19 Grand Challenge. Launched on Sept. 15, the global competition encouraged developers, data scientists, students, and creative minds to build world-class data science techniques and strategies that accelerate novel COVID-19 research and drive smart and safe decision-making. The C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge represents an opportunity to inform decision makers at the local, state, and federal levels and transform the way the world confronts this pandemic.
After a rigorous review process, the judging panel selected seven research projects for recognition. Judges assessed how well the entries leveraged data science techniques to derive insights that were not apparent before. The judges selected submissions that were most likely to unlock significant public health and economic benefits.
A total of $200,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to these research teams. Each has developed meaningful data-driven insights that will help the global community understand and mitigate not only the spread of COVID-19, but also prepare the world to fight future pandemics, improve the medical community’s ability to respond, and help policymakers navigate decisions about COVID-19.
C3.ai Grand Challenge Award Winners:
Grand Prize - $100,000
- Combined Diagnostics - Modeling Population Heterogeneity and Personalized COVID Diagnostics. Predicts an individual’s infectious and susceptibility status and probability of having COVID-19. The team applied the Bayesian Stochastic Expectation-Maximization method to demographics, individual health characteristics, and behavioral and geographical data to provide personalized estimates for each individual’s infectious and susceptibility statuses. (Freddy Bunbury - Carnegie Institution for Science, Nina Miolane - University of California, Santa Barbara, and Claire Donnat - University of Chicago)
“Any return to normality relies on accurately determining who might have COVID-19. Demographics, individual health characteristics, and behavioral and geographical data considerably alter one’s risk of catching, suffering from, and spreading the virus,” said Freddy Bunbury, post-doctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “Knowing this, we developed a machine learning model that is reactive, granular, and even personalized to help individuals, and – by extension – society, compute with greater accuracy the probability of having COVID-19. By intelligently combining these disparate data sources, we aim to more robustly capture people’s individual likelihood of having and spreading the disease, reduce false test results, and inform disease transmission models.”
“This project has huge potential to make an immediate impact on the pandemic with its approach to generating meaningful results from COVID testing,” said Thomas M. Siebel, CEO of C3.ai. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to apply informed decision-making based on data to enable daily life and business operations to continue, while effectively managing health risks.”
Second-Place Awards - $25,000 each
- DeepOutbreak: Framework for Forecasting Dynamics of COVID-19 and Co-Evolving Diseases. Models the progression of COVID-19 and symptomatically similar co-evolving influenza-like illnesses, as well as hospitalization and mortality rates. Designed to optimize healthcare deployment, which is especially important with hospitalizations resurging and healthcare workers increasingly becoming ill. (Alexander Rodriguez, Nikhil Muralidhar, Bijaya Adhikari, Naren Ramakrishnan, and B. Aditya Prakash - U.S.)
- Assessing Conservation Level of Therapeutic and Vaccine Targets of COVID-19. Predicts the effectiveness of vaccines and therapeutics by genome sequences and prioritizes relevant treatments to inform drug and vaccine development. (Yuanfang Guan and Manqi Zhou - U.S.)
Third-Place Awards - $12,500 each
- Analysis of COVID-19 Policies’ Impact on the Population and the Economy . Calculates the impact of government policies on COVID-19 infection rates, stock prices, and a population’s mobility to inform governments about how policies affect people and the economy. (Niti Wattanasirichaigoon, Napat Ratanakul, and Apiwat Jaroonpol - U.S., Singapore, and Japan)
- COVIDProf: An Intelligent Q&A Chatbot Tuned to Deliver Scientific Research and Data Related to COVID-19 in Natural Language. Makes finding and understanding relevant COVID-19 scientific research and data easier for the average person through an intelligent Q&A chatbot. (Varsha Rao and Joy Yeh - Singapore and Japan)
- Structural Modeling of COVID Spread in Relation to Human Mobility . Models causal relationships between human mobility indicators (trips, distance traveled, staying at home, and social distancing) and COVID-19 spread to inform how policymakers should take action. (Rezwana Rafiq, Tanjeeb Ahmed, and Md Yusuf Sarwar Uddin - U.S.)
- The Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) COVID -19 Linear Programming. Online tool for reopening communities that enables decision makers to study hypothetical scenarios to inform planning and protect high-risk individuals. (Victoria Chen, Yuan Zhou, Nilabh Ohol, Alireza Fallahi, and Amith Viswanatha - U.S.)
Award Criteria
The projects were reviewed on the basis of their scientific merit, the use of AI, machine learning, and/or other data science techniques in the project, and the incorporation of at least two data sources from the C3 AI® COVID-19 Data Lake.
The evaluation process also considered the extent to which the derived data science insights, if implemented at scale, will result in significant public health and economic benefit.
To learn more about the C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge, please visit https://c3.ai/c3-ai-covid-19-grand-challenge/.
About C3.ai
C3.ai is a leading AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation. C3.ai delivers the C3 AI Suite for developing, deploying, and operating large-scale AI, predictive analytics, and IoT applications in addition to an increasingly broad portfolio of turnkey AI applications. The core of the C3.ai offering is a proprietary, model-driven AI architecture that dramatically enhances data science and application development.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005727/en/
Contact information
Lisa Kennedy
415-914-8336
pr@c3.ai
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
VerSprite Launches Fork and Knife: AI-Driven Threat Modeling and Adversarial Testing Built for the Speed of Modern Software27.6.2026 00:28:00 EEST | Press release
VerSprite, a global leader in risk-based threat modeling and the firm behind the PASTA (Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis) methodology, today announced the general availability of Fork (www.forktm.com), a continuous application threat modeling platform, alongside Knife, an AI-led, human-on-the-loop adversarial testing platform for web applications and web API endpoints. Together, the two products operationalize a new model for product security—one where applications are securely designed, continuously modeled, and actively tested as part of the build process itself. The launch addresses a problem every security leader knows but few tools have solved: threat modeling is essential, never more so than in an AI-driven era, yet it has remained slow, manual, and anchored to frameworks designed for a different threat landscape. The problem: threat modeling matters more than ever—and most tools are stuck in 2005 For two decades, application threat modeling has leaned heavily on
Venture Global Announces Closing of $1.5 Billion Senior Secured Vessel Financing Facility26.6.2026 23:30:00 EEST | Press release
Venture Global, Inc. (NYSE: VG) announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Venture Global Shipping Holdings, LLC (“VGSH”), has entered into a Credit and Guaranty Agreement providing for a senior secured term loan facility (the “Facility”) in an aggregate principal amount of up to $1,500,000,000. The Facility will mature on June 26, 2032. Deutsche Bank and ING acted as coordinating lead arrangers for the Facility. ING also serves as facility agent and security trustee. VGSH intends to use the net proceeds from the Facility for general corporate purposes, including to reimburse Venture Global LNG, Inc. for payments previously made by it or its affiliates in connection with the acquisition of nine LNG carriers, funding certain reserve accounts, and paying transaction fees and expenses. About Venture Global Venture Global is an American producer and exporter of low-cost U.S. liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) with over 100 MTPA of capacity in production, construction, or development. Ven
Capco Recognized by OpenAI for Innovation and Responsible AI Leadership26.6.2026 21:00:00 EEST | Press release
Global management and technology consultancy Capco, a Wipro company,has been recognized by OpenAI for both AI innovation and responsible AI leadership. Capco received the AI Governance & Risk Excellence Award at the recent OpenAI Partner Summit 2026 in San Francisco, highlighting Capco’s ability to deliver enterprise-grade AI outcomes in highly regulated environments. The award recognizes Capco’s expert advantage when helping financial services and energy organizations to scale AI with confidence, balancing innovation with strong governance to reduce risk, strengthen compliance and improve customer outcomes. This award follows Capco winning the OpenAI Codex Hackathon, where its UK AI Lab competed against more than 30 teams and over 100 participants from across the OpenAI partner ecosystem. Capco's winning entry Sentra – a consulting-led, AI-powered retail banking solution – uses digital twin technology to identify vulnerable customers and recommend explainable next-best actions for fro
Incyte Announces Positive CHMP Opinion for Opzelura ® (ruxolitinib) Cream for the Treatment of Adults with Moderate Atopic Dermatitis26.6.2026 14:30:00 EEST | Press release
Incyte (Nasdaq: INCY) today announced that the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has issued a positive opinion recommending the approval of Opzelura® (ruxolitinib) cream for the treatment of moderate atopic dermatitis (AD) in adult patients for whom topical corticosteroids (TCSs) and topical calcineurin inhibitors (TCIs) are inadequate or inappropriate. “AD is a chronic skin condition that can have a significant impact on daily life. The positive CHMP opinion for Opzelura marks meaningful progress toward bringing the first non-steroidal topical JAK treatment option to adults in Europe with moderate AD for whom standard topical therapies have failed,” said Lee Heeson, Executive Vice President and Head of Incyte International. “If approved by the European Commission, Opzelura could help address an important gap for patients who have limited treatment options when TCSs and TCIs are inadequate or inappropriate.” The positive CHMP o
Datroway ® Recommended for Approval in the EU by CHMP as First-Line Treatment for Patients with Metastatic Triple Negative Breast Cancer Who Are Not Candidates for Immunotherapy26.6.2026 14:00:00 EEST | Press release
Datroway® (datopotamab deruxtecan) has been recommended for approval in the European Union (EU) as monotherapy for the first-line treatment of adult patients with unresectable or metastatic triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) who are not candidates for PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor therapy. Datroway is a specifically engineered TROP2 directed DXd antibody drug conjugate (ADC) discovered by Daiichi Sankyo (TSE: 4568) and being jointly developed and commercialized by Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca (LSE/STO/NYSE: AZN). The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) based its positive opinion on results from the TROPION-Breast02phase 3 trial, which werepresented at the 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology Congress and published in Annals of Oncology. The recommendation will now be reviewed by the European Commission, which has the authority to grant marketing authorizations for medicines in the EU. In TROPION-Breast02, Datroway demonstrated a
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom