The initiative, which has funding of 1 million euros, aims to promote the adoption of innovative solutions in Catalan and boost the competitiveness of the productive fabric, especially startups and SMEs
From today until 24 April, companies and members of the artificial intelligence (AI) community can submit projects to the Aina Challenge, the acceleration programme for the use and development of AI tools in Catalan promoted and funded by the Government of Catalonia and developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) within the framework of the Aina Project. The publication of the terms and conditions of the project competition marked the starting point.
Within the framework of the Aina Challenge, up to 22 projects that develop and improve natural language AI applications and services in Catalan will be funded with a total amount of 1 million euros. Each of the selected proposals will receive between €33,000 and €50,000, depending on the challenge they have addressed.
In the words of the Secretary for Digital Policies of the Catalan Government's Department of Business and Employment, Maria Galindo, “the Government is working to maximise opportunities for AI providers and users, and in this sense, with the Aina Project we are helping to provide the AI ecosystem in Catalonia with key resources to innovate with non-global languages and within the current regulatory framework”.
“This is why we are promoting and funding the Aina Challenge, with which we want to promote use cases with companies in the AI and language technology ecosystem that use resources generated within the framework of the Aina Project to develop natural language AI applications and services in Catalan that companies in all sectors can adopt, that reach the market and that have a beneficial impact,” she adds.
In the same vein, the leader of the BSC's Language Technologies Unit and head of the Aina Project at the institution, Marta Villegas, says that the Aina Challenge “represents a qualitative leap in the use of Aina's resources and a great opportunity to promote collaboration with industry and the community. It is a key initiative to continue perfecting Catalan language technologies and to guarantee its presence in the digital sphere”.
Challenges and objectives of the Aina Challenge
The ultimate goal of the Aina Challenge is to bring innovative solutions based on AI and Language Technologies (TL) in Catalan to the entire productive fabric, beyond the technological and digital sectors, and especially to startups and SMEs, in order to contribute to improving their competitiveness. To achieve this goal, the Aina Challenge promotes the development and improvement of AI applications for natural language processing in Catalan in order to bring them to the market.
The three challenges posed by the Aina Challenge, to which participating companies will have to offer a solution, are:
1. AI/TL services or applications in Catalan. Pilot testing and development of demonstrators (using the Aina Kit) of AI/TL services or applications in Catalan.
2. AI/TL 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.
3. Development of open resources. Contribute to building the Aina Project's ecosystem of open resources to help scale, adapt and make AI/TL in Catalan more robust.
Once all the proposals received have been analysed, a selection committee will choose up to 22 companies that will be able to access the acceleration programme. Each of the selected proposals will receive a financial endowment 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 programme.
About the Aina Project
Promoted by the Government - through the Secretariat for Digital Policies of the Department of Enterprise and Employment 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 all linguistic resources, corpora and computer models of the Catalan language, so that companies that create applications based on AI and Language Technologies, such as voice assistants, Internet search engines, automatic translators and correctors and conversational agents, can easily do so in Catalan.