The European Commission has launched an inducement prize aiming to develop an early-warning system to help prevent disease outbreaks and reduce their impacts after they occur.
The €5 million prize was launched as part of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Pilot in the last Work Programme of Horizon 2020 with the goal of developing a reliable, cost-effective and scalable early warning system prototype to forecast and monitor vector-borne diseases, which should encompass innovative technological solutions integrating big data derived from different sources (e.g. space-borne, airborne, in-situ and citizen observations) in the Earth observation domain.
The contest is open to all legal entities (i.e. natural or legal persons, including international organisations) or groups of legal entities and the prize will be awarded to the contestant(s) who, in the opinion of the jury, demonstrate a solution that best meets the criteria specified by the Commission.
Applications should be submitted by 1 September 2020 with the prize planned to be awarded in the first quarter of 2021.
Further information, including the rules of contest and the application template can be found on
https://ec.europa.eu/research/eic/index.cfm?pg=prizes_epidemics