3 Top Universities Reach ‘Atos IT Challenge 2019’ Finals Dedicated to Machine Learning for Sustainability

Atos reveals the 3 finalists of the Atos IT Challenge, an international student technology competition now running for the eighth year. This year’s theme focuses on how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies can support sustainable development. It generated particularly innovative ideas from teams from 20 countries around the globe.

The jury, composed of renowned experts and Atos top executives[1], has selected the following three projects, presented here in alphabetical order:

“BinSight”
Cantabria University (Spain)
BinSight is an innovative solution for reducing food waste and making supply chains smart combines an IoT prototype (with multiple sensors) with a cloud infrastructure, Machine Learning algorithms and a web dashboard. BinSight provides different cloud-based services tailored to the needs of businesses involved in the food supply chain such as catering companies, governments, social entities and compost companies.

“Farmero”
Technical University of Berlin (Germany)
Farmero is an innovative and easy-to-use application for small farms which delivers up-to-date and reliable disease-risk-assessments. It uses state-of-the-art disease detection algorithms applied on infrared satellite images provided by the European Space Agency (Copernicus program) to help farmers reduce the amount of fertilizers and pesticides they need to a minimum by giving them a precise evaluation of threats for every area in the field.

“Weego” (ex Sunubus)
Polytechnic School of Dakar (Senegal)
Weego is a predictive bus localization application that relies on crowdsourced data and Maching Learning techniques to give its users accurate bus localization and travel times without any formal AVL (Automatic Vehicle Locater) infrastructure. Weego enhances the public transport service specially in developing countries, where bus localization infrastructures are rare, and traffic is hard to predict.

The winners will be announced on July 2^nd during the awards ceremony in Paris. The winning team and runners up will each receive cash prizes - €10,000, €5,000 and €3,000 respectively - to help bring their app to market, along with support from numerous Atos top executives. All participants in the IT Challenge will be invited to apply for an internship to work as part of the Atos organization.

Commenting on these results, Sophie Proust, Chief Technology Officer at Atos, said: “I am glad to be part of the IT Challenge Jury, for the first time this year, and I am amazed by the great diversity and excellent level of all use cases presented. The students have found incredible creative ways to use IoT, Machine Learning and Cloud technologies to develop solutions supporting sustainable development – with an agile and incremental approach. On behalf of the Atos IT Challenge Jury, I would already like to congratulate the 3 finalist teams for their brilliant ideas and innovative projects, and we warmly thank all the other participating teams for their remarkable submissions.”

Malcolm McKee, Chief Technology Officer at Defra and member of the jury said: “It was a fantastic day and well worth the trip. The enthusiasm of the students is infectious, and the engineering was really impressive.”

More information about the competition, all the ideas submitted and the 15 shortlisted teams – on atositchallenge.net
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[1] Members of the IT Challenge 2019 jury: Mathilde Mougeot, Universities Professor, Data Science, ENSIIE / Malcolm McKee, Chief Technology Officer, Defra (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK) / Sophie Proust, Group Chief Technology Officer, Atos / Hubert Tardieu, Atos Chief Executive Officer’s Advisor, Co-Chair of Atos Scientific Community / Sylvie Raybaud, Head of Global Press Relations, Atos / Richard Hacking, Member of the Scientific Community