Nokia Bell Labs announced the Bell Labs Prize 2020, a competition for innovators from participating countries around the globe. It seeks to recognize innovations that solve the key challenges facing humanity  and provides selected innovators the unique opportunity to collaborate with Nokia Bell Labs researchers to help realize their vision.

Prize finalists will be given access to Bell Labs resources – software, hardware, systems, platforms and a set of brilliant collaborators from a huge variety of different disciplines and perspectives – to bring their ideas to the forefront of the next industrial revolution.

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.

Each finalist will also be considered for opportunities to work within Nokia Bell Labs to accelerate the advancement of their innovation, following the end of the competition.

In addition, Nokia Bell Labs may offer other contest participants the opportunity to work with Bell Labs researchers and across Nokia to collaborate on research projects involving 5G technologies and other innovations.

Categories: Web Applications, Cloud Services, Information Theory, Coding Theory, Computational Sciences, Cryptography, Distributed Systems, Data Privacy, Mathematics of Networks, Modulation Schemes, Optical Systems or Components, Communications Systems, Network Protocols, Security, Network Architecture, RF design, Sustainability, Wireless, Fixed Network technologies, Software-Defined Networks, Virtualization Technologies, Real-time Analytics, Search algorithms, Self-Optimizing Networks, Inference systems.

Nokia’s Corporate CTO and President of Nokia Bell Labs, Marcus Weldon, 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.”

Applications to enter the Bell Labs Prize 2020 competition must be submitted by April 27, 2020.

The top 50 submissions will be invited to work with Bell Labs researchers to turn their ideas into compelling proposals.

The top five finalists will then be selected to compete for the top three prizes at an event to be held in December in front of a panel of renowned experts and industry leaders.

First place winners, PhD student Tianshi Wang and Professor Jaijeet Roychowdhury of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California at Berkeley – Photo Credit: Nokia Bell Prize website
Previous year’s winners have included some of the most innovative minds and researchers at top universities around the world, including Tianshi Wang and Jaijeet Roychowdhury from the University of California at Berkeley for developing an integrated circuit that solves discrete optimization 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).

Complete rules and information can be found on the prize website.

Application
For more information, visit Nokia Bell Labs Prize.