A team of scientists from the FIT CTU Data Science Laboratory and the Meteopress company was among the finalists of the AI Awards 2023 out of 111 nominees. They are thus one of the top three projects in the “AI in research and development” category. They were nominated for their cooperation between academia and industry in developing algorithms that increase the accuracy of precipitation forecasts. The award ceremony took place during the AI Days in Prague on 1 November 2023.
The award-winning team of scientists from the FIT CTU Data Science Laboratory and the Meteopress company has been cooperating for a long time on developing advanced algorithms that increase the accuracy of short- and medium-term precipitation forecasts. The team also won at the prestigious international conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in the Weather4cast competition. In the competition challenge, they had to predict precipitation as accurately as possible based on satellite data from 7 different regions over a 2-year time period. The uniqueness of their winning project is that it can very realistically simulate extreme precipitation forecasts in places where weather radars are unavailable, such as developing countries.
“The recognition of our team in the AI Awards not only confirms the importance and diversity of AI research in the Czech Republic but also provides another strong motivation for further development of our algorithms to contribute to the global fight against climate change,” said Mgr. Petr Šimánek, an expert from the FIT CTU Data Science Laboratory.
The AI Awards is currently the only professional award in the artificial intelligence field. The award ceremony aims to highlight success stories, personalities, companies and organizations that have significantly contributed to the development of artificial intelligence in the Czech Republic. The winners of the AI Awards are selected based on public nominations by an expert jury consisting of leading representatives of the Czech AI scene and other personalities. This year, the jury selected from a total of 111 submitted nominations.
“Not only the total number of nominations but, above all, their quality and diversity confirm to us how many great personalities and companies are involved in AI in the Czech Republic. Awarding the best ones is then only a pleasant duty. We understandably want to show how they advance artificial intelligence in our country. However, inspiration for others who are or will be dedicated to this technology is just as important,” said Lukáš Kačena, the director of prg.ai, on behalf of the organizers.
