ENAIRE, the national air navigation service provider, presented the awards for the second edition of its Business Ideas Competition and the third edition of the Technological Challenges Competition. Both were managed through the Open Innovation programme of CRIDA, its research, development and innovation (R&D) subsidiary.
The second edition of the Business Ideas Competition incubated five shortlisted ideas, with the winner being AirEmpires: Sky Management, a real-time strategy game available on the website that merges air traffic management with construction and expansion, Age of Empires style, and whose goal is to introduce the air navigation system to the youngest audience.
The winner of the third edition of the Technological Challenges Competition was the Machine Learning and Quantum Computing Group at the Autonomous University of Madrid, with their Quantum Reservoir Computing solution, which addresses the challenge of exploring how quantum computing can transform the ability to analyse multiple operational scenarios simultaneously and efficiently.
ENAIRE, as part of its commitment to a strategy of open innovation, has launched several initiatives through CRIDA to progressively attract innovative talent and create an ecosystem around air traffic management: Business Ideas Competition, Technological Challenges Competition and Acceleration Competition (startup accelerator). These competitions seek to capture ideas and solutions at different stages of maturity.
At the award ceremony, Enrique Maurer, ENAIRE's CEO, said: "By presenting these awards, we are consolidating ENAIRE's decision to invest in open innovation yet again this year, an initiative through which we seek to find ideas and potential businesses to improve the service that ENAIRE provides to society".
Business Ideas Competition
The aim of the Business Ideas competition is to bolster entrepreneurship and help transform business ideas into real solutions.
Intended for undergraduates, doctoral students, professors or future entrepreneurs, the competition played out over two phases. During the first phase, five ideas were short-listed to undergo a three-month of incubation period to mature their business plan, with the idea with the best business plan being selected in the second phase.
The winner in the second phase was AirEmpires: Sky Management, a real-time strategy game that can be played on the website that combines air traffic management with construction and expansion, Age of Empires style, in an effort to disseminate the air navigation system to the youngest audience. Francisco Javier Rodríguez Martínez, Lorena Otero Cerdeira, Rubén Fernández Boullón, Manuel Alonso Carracedo and Antonio Adrián González Pedrouzo were the creators of the winning idea, for which they received a prize worth 10,000 euros. Over the last three months of the incubation, they were guided in weekly sessions by several mentors appointed by ENAIRE.
Technological Challenges Competition
The aim of the Technological Challenges competition is to find medium- and long-term solutions to technological challenges in the field of air transport by using technologies from other areas.
The contest proved to be very popular, receiving nearly 30 proposals from prestigious universities, research centres and private companies.
The winner was the Machine Learning and Quantum Computing group at the Autonomous University of Madrid, with their solution “Quantum Reservoir Computing: a tool to improve air traffic”, which addresses the challenge of exploring the quantum frontier to redefine efficiency in planning European airspace resources.
They propose using the recent Machine Learning technique known as Reservoir Computing (RC), which relies on using a recursive neural network in the middle layer to apply it to the prediction of air traffic, especially by anticipating crises and detecting the factors that affect it in real time.
Florentino Borondo Rodríguez, professor of Quantum Chemistry at the Autonomous University of Madrid, leads the team made up of Javier Borondo Benito, professor of Data Science at the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas-ICAI and CEO of the startup Agrowingdata, and Mar Grande Toledano, a professor at the UTAD University (Madrid) and a senior scientist at Agrowingdata.
Their participation demonstrates the commitment and experience of this university to the search for cutting-edge solutions. The prize consists of an 18-month research agreement and a financial reward of 60,000 euros.
