Innovate the Creative and Cultural Industries with AI: ICC 2026 Winners Announced

The 15th edition of the Idiap Create Challenge (ICC) concluded after nine days of intensive coding, inspiring talks, and engaging social events.

Ten teams competed this year, presenting a diverse range of ideas in the creative and cultural industries:

B4Press — AI editorial assistant by Abdellatif Ryad and Brent Franco.
Booklitics — Market intelligence platform for authors and publishers by Guillaume Mezino.
CostumeNet AI — AI-assisted cataloguing solution for costume collections by Cinzia Fossati and Raphaël Raynouard.
Echoes — AI guide for exploring museums and cultural heritage sites by Nidhir Bhavsar and Swathi Selvaraj.
FUSE — AI framework for reconstructing fragments of damaged cultural and decorative objects by Yulia Kulagina and Sylvain Calinon.
Memoir — AI-powered audiobooks for people with memory and cognitive challenges by Girish, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar and Muskaan Singh.
Memora — AI-driven interactive digital twins of cultural sites and their histories by João Souza, José Henrique Lima Dias and Marco Bueno.
Roami — Mobile app for exploring cities, monuments, and heritage sites by Sarah Delporte, Imen Ben Mahmoud and Samuel Michel.
SandroAI — AI-assisted typography co-designer by Amra Levak, Sebastijan Žamarija and Marko Bralić.
Volumen — Text-to-3D storytelling platform by Ünsal Öztürk and Vidit Vidit.

Three awards were presented:

The Innovation Award (CHF 10,000) was shared between two teams whose projects particularly impressed the jury. The Volumen team received CHF 2,000 for its tool that visualizes scenes from book excerpts, offering a creative way to bring texts to life and enrich the reading experience. The CostumNet AI team was awarded CHF 8,000 for its AI‑based cataloguing assistant designed for costume collections in the performing arts and audiovisual sectors.

The People’s Choice Award (CHF 500) went to Roami, whose mobile application reimagines how users explore cities, monuments, and cultural sites.

Together, these projects highlight the creative momentum of the hackathon and demonstrate the growing role of artificial intelligence in shaping new practices within the cultural and creative sectors.