Brussels, 08 Oct 2002
The 20 winners of the most competitive European Information Society Technology (IST) prize in the contest's history have been announced.
Each of the winning teams will now look forward to the possibility of scooping one of three grand prizes at the IST 2002 event in Copenhagen. With 200,000 euro and international exposure guaranteed for each project to take a grand prize, the teams are well aware of the commercial opportunities that success in Denmark could bring.
The prize, sponsored by the EU Commission under the IST section of the Fifth Framework Programme, is open to companies and institutions that develop products representing innovation in IST. The 437 entries for this year's event is the highest number in the prize's seven-year history, with the 20 winners representing Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The 20 winners were judged on several key criteria: technical excellence, innovative content, potential market value and capacity to generate new jobs. Among the selected projects, the types of products developed include:
- A mobile network-based traffic information collection and distribution system that enables the generation of a real-time traffic map without the need of a special infrastructure.
- The first platform that fully integrates audio, video and web conferencing services, accessible on demand through the Internet.
- An innovative hearing instrument that uses advanced digital signal processing techniques to detect and prioritise the human voice in noisy environments, and alleviate occlusion and acoustic feedback problems.
The three IST Grand Prize winners will receive their trophies from Mr Erkki Liikanen, EU Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society, during the three day IST conference from 4 to 6 November.
For further information, please consult the following web addresses:
http://ist-prize.org
http://2002.istevent.cec.eu.int
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/home.html