Finalists will be given access to Bell Labs resources – software, hardware, systems, platforms and a set of collaborators from a variety of different disciplines and perspectives – to help improve or scale their ideas. In addition, the top three finalists will receive awards of $100,000 (grand prize), $50,000 (second place) or $25,000 (third place) to help enhance their innovations.
Marcus Weldon, Nokia’s corporate CTO and president of Nokia Bell Labs, said, “We are on the verge of an industrial revolution that will lead to unprecedented productivity gains driven by humans, machines and systems working in perfect harmony. Bell Labs researchers are defining this new future through disruptive research focused on solving the key challenges facing humanity in this next technological revolution. The Bell Labs Prize is a unique opportunity for other brilliant minds around the world to join us on this journey and be given full access to our researchers, facilities and resources so that we can collaborate on inventing the future.”
Previous year’s winners have included Tianshi Wang and Jaijeet Roychowdhury from the University of California at Berkeley for developing an integrated circuit that solves discrete optimisation computing problems with a speed and efficiency that rival quantum computers (2019); Samory Kpotufe, assistant professor at Columbia University, for his pioneering work on the critically important field of “transfer learning” in machine learning (2018); and Kaushik Sengupta, assistant professor at Princeton University for his invention of a radical new transceiver chip technology (2017).
Applications must be submitted by April 27, 2020. Complete rules and information can be found on the prize website.
