
The Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs grants this new prize as its highest honour in recognition of outstanding digital products, services and applications in Austria. The three categories comprise the main aspects of digitisation. The jury of experts bestowed the 2019 State Prize for Digitisation in the category “Digital Products and Solutions” on the project called "Hydrogrid" carried out by the company with the same name based in Vienna. The “software as a service” solution designed to optimally control and operate small hydropower plants is based on a fundamentally new approach to optimise small power stations.
The firm “Cubes” from Salzburg beat out the competition in the category “Digital Transformation”. According to the jury, the project completely digitalised the value chain in the production of casted close contour blocks for moulding in the important Austrian business areas of automobile and aircraft component supply. The Austrian State Prize in the category “Artificial Intelligence” was given to the Salzburger Land tourist association for the project "Tourist Knowledge Graph of Salzburger Land". Digital communication in the field of tourism is supported in this project by means of semi-automatic structuring, annotation and the recognition and linkage of meaningful connections and correlations of contents.