There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.
General machine intelligence
The David E. Rumelhart prize is an annual award for making a "significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition". The prize is $100,000.
The Human-Competitive Award is an annual challenge started in 2004 to reward results "competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans". The prize is $10,000. Entries are required to use evolutionary computing.
The Intel AI Global Impact Festival is an international annual competition held by Intel Corporation for school, and college students with prizes upwards of $15,000. It is about artificial intelligence technology. There are two age brackets in this competition, 13-18 Age Group, and 18 and Above Age Group.
The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is a biannual award given at the IJCAI conference to researcher in artificial intelligence as a recognition of excellence of their career.
The 2011 Federal Virtual World Challenge, advertised by The White House and sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory's Simulation and Training Technology Center, held a competition offering a total of US$52,000 in cash prize awards for general artificial intelligence applications, including "adaptive learning systems, intelligent conversational bots, adaptive behavior (objects or processes)" and more.
The Machine Intelligence Prize is awarded annually by the British Computer Society for progress towards machine intelligence.
The Kaggle – "the world's largest community of data scientists compete to solve most valuable problems".
Conversational behaviour
The Loebner prize is an annual competition to determine the best Turing test competitors. The winner is the computer system that, in the judges' opinions, demonstrates the "most human" conversational behaviour, they have an additional prize for a system that in their opinion passes a Turing test. This second prize has not yet been awarded.
Automatic control
Pilotless aircraft
The International Aerial Robotics Competition is a long-running event begun in 1991 to advance the state of the art in fully autonomous air vehicles. This competition is restricted to university teams (although industry and governmental sponsorship of teams is allowed). Key to this event is the creation of flying robots which must complete complex missions without any human intervention. Successful entries are able to interpret their environment and make real-time decisions based only on a high-level mission directive (e.g., "find a particular target inside a building having certain characteristics which is among a group of buildings 3 kilometers from the aerial robot launch point"). In 2000, a $30,000 prize was awarded during the 3rd Mission (search and rescue), and in 2008, $80,000 in prize money was awarded at the conclusion of the 4th Mission (urban reconnaissance).
Driverless cars
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a series of competitions to promote driverless car technology, aimed at a congressional mandate stating that by 2015 one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the US Armed Forces should be unmanned. While the first race had no winner, the second awarded a $2 million prize for the autonomous navigation of a hundred-mile trail, using GPS, computers and a sophisticated array of sensors. In November 2007, DARPA introduced the DARPA Urban Challenge, a sixty-mile urban area race requiring vehicles to navigate through traffic. In November 2010 the US Armed Forces extended the competition with the $1.6 million prize Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge to consider cooperation between multiple vehicles in a simulated-combat situation.
Roborace will be a global motorsport championship with autonomously driving, electrically powered vehicles. The series will be run as a support series during the Formula E championship for electric vehicles. This will be the first global championship for driverless cars.
Data-mining and prediction
The Netflix Prize was a competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by Netflix, an online DVD-rental service. The prize was $1,000,000.
The Pittsburgh Brain Activity Interpretation Competition will reward analysis of fMRI data "to predict what individuals perceive and how they act and feel in a novel Virtual Reality world involving searching for and collecting objects, interpreting changing instructions, and avoiding a threatening dog." The prize in 2007 was $22,000.