AI is a general-purpose technology that is expected to substantially contribute to all sectors and applications. AI technologies have demonstrated great value and potential in areas as diverse as healthcare, supply chain logistics, space-based imagery analysis, cybersecurity. However, there are challenges that AI technologies are facing. When it comes to deployment of AI technologies, reliable performance is required. Despite its huge potential and its ability to cut down on tasks and costs, AI faces trust issues with humans. At the same time, the failure modes of AI technologies are poorly understood.

Open innovation challenges can foster broad and robust progress on generic AI research challenges. The resulting scientific progress resulting such challenges will contribute to the robustness of AI systems in general, enabling a multitude of different applications across many sectors.

Proposals are expected to organize open innovation challenges aiming to bring the best research teams across variety of public and private organisations that try to tackle and crack major S&T challenges in AI by benchmarking different solutions. The open innovation challenges will be bootstrapped by engaging EU funded projects to participate. Newcomers, rising stars and the wider AI community should be able to join the challenges, giving them the opportunity to benchmark against prestigious teams. The best performing team(s) should be awarded with either with monitory prizes^[1], which industry can co-sponsor, and/or non-monetary prizes, e.g. co-authorship of a paper in a prestigious scientific journal, internship in prestigious labs or companies.

[1] Large industry as well as project beneficiaries from CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-01, CL4-2024-HUMAN-01-01, CL4-2024-HUMAN-01-02 and CL4-2024-HUMAN-01-03 will not be eligible for monetary prizes