The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic "avatar" system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in a remote environment as though physically present. The competition featured a unique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than one hour of training on the human-machine interfaces, and avatar systems were judged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents a unified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, and organizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies and innovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, and correlate the use of these technologies with judges' task performance and subjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads, judges, and organizers about the competition's execution and impact to inform the future development of telerobotics and telepresence.

The $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE aimed to create avatar systems that can transport human presence to remote locations in real time. The participants of this multi-year competition developed robotic systems that allow operators to see, hear, and interact with a remote environment in a way that feels as if they are truly there. On the other hand, people in the remote environment were given the impression that the operator was present inside the avatar robot. At the competition finals, held in November 2022 in Long Beach, CA, USA, the avatar systems were evaluated on their support for remotely interacting with humans, exploring new environments, and employing specialized skills. This article describes the competition stages with tasks and evaluation procedures, reports the results, presents the winning teams' approaches, and discusses lessons learned.

The COVID-19 pandemic hasn't only led to the loss of lives, but also to the loss of livelihoods worldwide as businesses close due to necessary lockdowns. It's had major economic impact across industries, and experts believe the world will continue feeling it for years to come, even after vaccines become available. It's still unclear when a vaccine will come out, though, and local economies need to reopen soon if they haven't yet. In an effort to find ways on how to safely reopen societies in the midst of a pandemic, XPrize has teamed up with Cognizant on a new competition with a $500,000 prize purse. The XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge will have participants build data--driven AI models that can predict local coronavirus transmission rates.

The 2020 Breakthrough Days event aims to generate and fuel meaningful projects in each of this year's three AI for Good Global Summit domains – Gender, Food, and Pandemics – that will advance progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hear from keynote speakers and participate in interactive workshops designed to launch solutions to some of the world's greatest challenges. "Beneficial AI to advance SDGs" Keynote Speaker: Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley Moderator: Amir Banifatemi, Chief Innovation Officer, XPRIZE; Chair of the AI for Good Programme Committee In an effort to allow teams to prepare for main stage presentations on Monday and Tuesday, we have designated Friday 25 September as a time for teams and attendees to converse individually. Please use the AI for Good workspace on Slack to continue the conversation. Join us on Monday 28 September as we hear from teams in each of this year's AI for Good Breakthrough Track "What is AI for Good Anyway?" Keynote Speaker: Sasha Luccioni, Postdoctoral Researcher – AI for Humanity, Université de Montréal, Mila – Quebec AI Institute Moderator: Amir Banifatemi, Chief Innovation Officer, XPRIZE; Chair of the AI for Good Programme Committee Keynote Address Keynote Speaker: Peter H. Diamandis, entrepreneur, founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, Bestselling author of "Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think" Moderator: Amir Banifatemi, Chief Innovation Officer, XPRIZE; Chair of the AI for Good Programme Committee Interested individuals and teams from around the world have submitted project ideas to the Gender, Food and Pandemics Breakthrough Tracks. After being mentored by world-renowned experts and Brain Trusts, the top three finalists in each domain have been selected to present their project proposals in a series of interactive workshops during the Breakthrough Days event.

As Japan's second female astronaut to fly up in the Space Shuttle Discovery, Naoko Yamazaki didn't expect to spend a quarter of her time dusting, feeding mice and doing other menial jobs. It can cost more than $430 million a year to keep an astronaut in orbit, according to three-year-old startup called Gitai Inc. It's only possible to keep humans alive in outer space because of the money and effort poured into ensuring their safety. One way to bring down the cost and risks is to send an avatar -- a remotely controlled robot. "There's a need for robots that can help us," Yamazaki, 49, said.

Iris.ai is a top competitor in the third year of the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, and the XPRIZE crew is joining us in Helsinki to see what we and the Finnish AI community has to offer. AI Monday is a network of technology enthusiasts that organises monthly events around the world, including at Maria01. What better excuse to bring together smart, lovely, driven people across the community? The evening will, beyond the fun, include an introduction by us at Iris.ai, XPRIZE and AI Monday. A short presentation on what we should know about AI from Teemu Roos, Professor of Computer Science at University of Helsinki, and a panel discussion with Ville Hulkko from Silo.ai, Anu Passi-Rauste from Head.ai and Anita Schjoll-Brede from Iris.ai on the topic of the challenges and opportunities of running an AI business.

More than 80 percent of the world's oceans are currently unmapped, but a $7 million prize pool to explore the deep sea hopes to change that. The Ocean Discovery XPrize was today awarded to teams using uncrewed deep-sea vehicles to map the ocean floor and trace chemical signals underwater. The goal is to develop a comprehensive atlas by 2030. The grand prize required entrants to develop an autonomous vessel capable of mapping at least 250 square kilometres of the sea floor within 24 hours, up to a depth of 4 kilometres below surface level. The maps must be fairly high resolution, with data points taken no more than five metres apart.

Earlier this year, XPRIZE announced a new challenge: a four-year global competition to "develop real life avatars," with a US $10 million prize sponsored by All Nippon Airways (ANA). We like robot challenges, especially robot challenges with prizes big enough to attract top-notch competition, and the idea of creating remote presence systems that can do more than just send back video is a compelling one, with all kinds of potential use cases. However, our first reaction to the sample of potential challenge scenarios published by XPRIZE was that they weren't nearly difficult and compelling enough, meaning that the challenge wouldn't promote the kind of cutting-edge innovation that we (and presumably XPRIZE) would like to see. To their credit, XPRIZE has put a lot of work into incorporating feedback from a variety of experts based on those initial guidelines, and today they are releasing a revised version of the challenge guidelines that have been completely recalibrated for a more difficult and long-term relevant challenge that we're now super excited for. The ANA Avatar XPRIZE seeks to incentivize innovators around the world to imagine a future with avatars and integrate several emerging and exponential technologies to create a useful and functional physical robotic Avatar System.

At the South by Southwest festival last week, XPRIZE announced the launch of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, "a four-year global competition to develop real-life avatars." The idea is to bring together many different kinds of remote robotic technologies to create an easy to use, effective, and immersive remote experience. Challenges like these have proved very effective in the past--DARPA in particular has sponsored massive advances in both self-driving cars and humanoid robots. Part of the reason that DARPA was able to do this is by carefully asking for what is almost, but not quite, impossible. Or what former DARPA program manager Gill Pratt used to call "DARPA hard."

Realistic avatars could soon allow us to remotely see, hear, touch and interact with faraway locations. A new global competition is charging scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators with the task of creating a real-life robotic avatar by 2021. Launched by the XPrize Foundation, a non-profit organization that encourages technological innovation, the competition promises to award $10 million to the first team that can make the technology a reality in just four years. A new XPrize competition enlists teams around the world to create the first real-life robotic avatar by 2021. The winning team is eligible to win a prize worth $10 million.