- The Aina Challenge is the program to accelerate the use and development of AI tools in Catalan promoted by the Catalan Government and developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) within the framework of the Aina Project.
- Companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) and language technologies (LT) sector that wish to apply for the program will be able to submit their proposals from today until April 24.
- The Aina Challenge aims to promote the adoption of innovative solutions based on AI and LT in Catalan among the entire productive fabric, especially startups and SMEs, to make it more competitive.
- Each of the selected proposals will receive a financial grant of between €33,000 and €50,000, depending on the challenge to which it has responded.
From today until April 24, companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) and language technologies (LT) sector will be able to present their projects in the Aina Challenge , the program to accelerate the use and development of AI tools in Catalan promoted and funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) within the framework of the Aina Project . The publication of the project competition rules has marked the start of the competition.
Through this competition, the Catalan Government will finance, with a total amount of 1 million euros, up to 22 projects that develop and improve natural language AI applications and services in Catalan.
In the words of the Secretary of Digital Policies of the Department of Business and Employment from Generalitat de Catalunya, Maria Galindo , “ from the Government we work to maximize the opportunities for AI providers and users, and in this sense, with the Aina Project we contribute to providing the AI ecosystem of Catalonia with key resources to innovate with non-global languages and within the current regulatory framework ”. “That is why we are promoting and funding the Aina Challenge, with which we want to promote use cases with companies in the AI ecosystem and language technologies that use resources generated within the framework of the Aina Project to develop natural language AI applications and services in Catalan that companies from all sectors can adopt, that reach the market and that have an impact for the benefit of the end user ”, she adds.
In this same sense, the head of the Language Technologies Unit of the BSC and responsible for the Aina Project at the entity, Marta Villegas , assures that “The Aina Challenge represents a qualitative leap in the use of Aina’s resources and a great opportunity to promote collaboration with the industry and the community. It is a key initiative to continue perfecting Catalan language technologies and guaranteeing their presence in the digital sphere. “.
Challenges and objectives of the Aina Challenge
The Aina Challenge has as its ultimate objective to bring innovative solutions based on AI and LT in Catalan to the entire productive fabric, beyond the technological and digital sectors and especially to startups and SMEs, to contribute to improving their competitiveness. To achieve this objective, the Aina Challenge promotes the development and improvement of AI applications for natural language processing in Catalan with the aim of eventually incorporating them into the market.
The three challenges posed by the Aina Challenge, to which participating companies must offer a solution, are:
- AI/LT services or applications in Catalan. Pilot testing and development of demonstrators (using Aina Kit) of AI/LT services or applications in Catalan.
- AI/LT control and monitoring . Testing and development of demonstrators (using Aina Kit) of systems for monitoring, control and/or alignment in the use of AI/LT models and applications in Catalan.
- Open source resource development. Contribute to building the Aina Project’s open resource ecosystem to help scale, adapt and make AI/LT in Catalan more robust.
Once all the proposals received have been analyzed, a selection committee will choose up to 22 companies that will be able to access the acceleration program. Each of the selected proposals will receive a financial grant of €50,000 (if it responds to challenge 1) or €33,000 (if it responds to challenges 2 or 3), subject to the roadmap of this program.
About the Aina Project
Promoted by the Catalan Government – through the Secretariat of Digital Policies of the Department of Business and Labour and within the framework of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of Catalonia Catalonia.AI – and developed by the BSC, the Aina Project aims to generate and make available to everyone linguistic resources, corpora and computer models of the Catalan language so that companies that create applications based on AI and LT, such as voice assistants, Internet search engines, automatic translators and correctors and conversational agents, can do so easily in Catalan.
