We have received many amazing candidates for each category, board members of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Lithuania did a great but tough job selecting the best of them and now it's your turn to decide who will become the winners!
Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the candidates in each category by reading the description below before proceeding to voting. In each category please select one nominee that you think deserves this award the most.
Voting is open until the 8th of December, 23:59.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AI Company of the Year
- Biomatter. Biomatter is a synthetic biology company that creates new proteins for health and sustainable manufacturing applications. The company has developed the AI-driven Intelligent Architecture™ platform that addresses limitations of current engineering approaches to unlock completely new horizons for protein design and development. Biomatter enables the ability to efficiently build solutions for critical global challenges and accelerates the transition to a sustainable and healthy world for humans and the planet.
- Neurotechnology. Neurotechnology was founded with the key idea of using neural networks for applications such as biometric person identification, computer vision, robotics and artificial intelligence. Much to our delight, we were able to endure the "neural networks winter" by using and expanding this expertise all through 2012, the year that brought explosive developments in the concept and infrastructure of deep neural networks. This allowed us to quickly take advantage of the emerging opportunities that came with the new wave of deep learning and triggered an entire range of new projects in object recognition and other applications.
- Vinted. Vinted Marketplace is the largest online international C2C marketplace in Europe dedicated to second-hand fashion, with a growing community of members across Europe and beyond.With a mission to make second-hand the first choice worldwide, Vinted enables people to sell and buy second-hand clothes and lifestyle items from each other, helping give those items a second or even third life.Vinted Go launched in 2022, with a focus on developing products and solutions for more seamless shipping and delivery across Europe. Vinted Go has more than 200,000 PUDO points across Europe to support the delivery of millions of parcels per year.Vinted was founded in 2008 in Lithuania and in 2019 became the country’s first Unicorn. Today Vinted is still headquartered in Vilnius, with offices in Lithuania, Germany and , the Netherlands, and over 1,800 employees. It is backed by six leading venture capital firms: Accel, Burda Principal Investments, EQT Growth, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sprints Capital.
AI for Social Good
- EdTech Centras. The EdTech Center of the National Education Agency was established to carry out a national mission - the digital transformation of the education system. The center introduces educational institutions - from kindergartens to universities - to the most innovative educational tools, invites them to try out new, engaging digital learning solutions in schools, ranging from career planning and personal development programs to virtual reality.
- GovTech Lab Lithuania. GovTech Lab helps the public sector identify challenges that can be solved by emerging technologies, engages startups and SMEs to create innovative solutions and accelerates teams in the #GovTech field.
- Innovation Agency (Inovacijų Agentūra). Innovation Agency Lithuania is responsible for the Lithuanian innovation ecosystem and the promotion of innovation at all stages of business development – from developing ideas to delivering products and services to end-users. Our clients range from startups to small-and medium sized businesses with tailor-made services.
AI Educator of the Year
- Jurgita Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė. Jurgita Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė has been a lecturer at Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) since 2005 and her passion is language technology. In her lectures, she combines theoretical and practical knowledge gained through research (about 60 scientific publications) at VMU and Tilde IT. She is most motivated by a strong desire to pass on the knowledge she has gained to the younger generation and to see her students "grow up".
- Linas Petkevičius. Linas Petkevičius is a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, and teaches a course on deep learning methods. Linas supervises the final theses of bachelor's and master's students, which are written on machine learning topics. In between his activities, he is a frequent speaker and participant at public events, giving talks, discussions and presentations on AI technologies.
- Aurimas Griciūnas. Aurimas is a seasoned Data Professional with over a decade experience in Data Science, Data/ML/MLOps Engineering fields. He says he is obsessed with building out Data Capabilities at scale and helping organisations implement their Data Driven visions. Aurimas is also helping practitioners to Level Up in MLOps, Data Engineering, Machine Learning and related Data fields by sharing his knowledge on the Linkedin platform where he has over 80 000 followers and his newsletter SwirlAI with over 20 000 subscriptions globally.
AI Rising Star of the Year
- Mantas Lukauskas. Mantas claims that he never imagined that he would pursue programming despite encouragement from his teachers. Instead, he embarked on a journey into the world of physical sciences and additional studies in economics. But after graduating with honors, Mantas pivoted his master's degree towards mathematics. Today, he continues to expand his knowledge by pursuing doctoral studies in informatics. "I can really call the last few years the years of growth, evolving from analyst to data scientist to project tech lead, supervising students’ final thesis, making lectures about math and AI, and mentoring students as a career mentor in data science/AI field", - Mantas says. He is currently a Data Scientist/Tech Lead @Hostinger, where they are building a future of hosting using AI, and researcher @KTU. In the last couple of years, Mantas has released more than 10 scientific works and participated in multiple international conferences and still counting. This September, finished the EU-funded project, which was nominated for “Europos burės 2023” and can contribute to Lithuania's public sector. "There are more and more AI ideas, and I am working towards them and won’t stop doing that because this field is work, hobby, and leisure at the same time", - Mantas says.
- Shubham Juneja. Shubham works on researching AI methods for brain computer interfaces at Neurotechnology, along with that he is also a PhD student at Vilnius University researching imitation learning for autonomous driving and has recently published one of the first autonomous driving papers from Lithuania along with his supervisors.
- Turing College. Turing College is the first private EU-accredited Artificial Intelligence college in the Baltic region. The college currently has ~1000 students from 20+ countries. They offer globally recognized 6-24 months programs in data science and machine learning, analytics, data engineering and help you take the next step in your career! Moreover, this Turing College offers Master's studies in Data Science and Analytics, affiliated with Woolf, a renowned higher education institution within the European Union. What sets Turing College apart from its competitors is its innovative approach to learning. Our methodology involves short intensive sprints inspired by the Agile method that is used by such industry leaders as Google, Apple and Facebook.
