Five finalists compete for Nvidia 2016 Global Impact Award this week

As of February 1st, Nvidia has announced five finalists to compete for its 2016 Global Impact Award, a yearly 150,000 research grant that goes to any researcher or institution that has used Nvidia GPU technology to make a positive social or humanitarian impact. This year's finalist teams come from Stanford University, Imperial College London, George Mason University, Duke University and Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology. Stanford finalist: "GPUs Help Map Worldwide Poverty" One of the five selected finalists this year is machine learning expert Stefano Ermon, who partnered with food security specialists David Lobell, Marshall Burke and some Stanford engineering students for their work in using GPU-accelerated deep learning to turn regular Google Earth images into statistical poverty models. The team trained a neural network to accurately predict poverty levels in sub-Saharan Africa from satellite image features like roads, farmlands and homes. "There are countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which the most recent data we have is 20 years old, so we're still extrapolating from early '90s estimates," says Ermon.