Dallas, TX (October 26, 2020)  – BALANCED Media|Technology (BALANCED) today announced the company has won the prestigious 2020 Emerging Company Innovation Award from Tech Titans. BALANCED is a purpose-driven technology company that crowdsources human interaction and intuition through human computational gaming (HCG) to facilitate the processing of data and training of machine learning (ML) algorithms.  The Tech Titans Awards recognize the elite in North Texas technology – individuals currently transforming the high-tech industry and giving companies competitive edges as well as companies leading the way in innovation and technical applications. The Emerging Company Innovation Award recognizes outstanding innovation and unique accomplishments through potential breakthrough technology, processes or services within the technology and communications industry.

BALANCED developed the HEWMEN® technology, a new breed of AI platform that combines gaming, distributed computing, and human intelligence to improve ML. HEWMEN discreetly injects scientific datasets into new or existing video games, where the data can be cleaned, clustered, and labeled. Humans, through gameplay, then apply intuition to train and accelerate machine learning, leading to more accurate and precise models using much smaller data sets than required by traditional ML training models.  As players interact with the games, they simultaneously act upon datasets to solve complex problems or to help a computer vision algorithm learn to “read” a certain type of image.  These improvements can utilize smaller data sets, improve pipelines, and allow for better talent utilization.

“At BALANCED we are creating a world in which time spent enjoying entertainment becomes time spent unlocking opportunity,” said Robert M. Atkins, BALANCED’s CEO. “We are honored that Tech Titans shares our excitement for this vision of bringing purpose to play and accomplishing that which cannot be done by man or machine alone.“

In addition to the award, BALANCED’s CTO, Corey Clark, PhD, was a finalist for the 2020 Corporate CTO Award which recognizes technical leadership, team building, creation and maintenance of a creative environment and market awareness skills.  In 2019, Clark was the winner of Tech Titan’s Technology Inventor award.   Clark, who is also the deputy director of research at Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Guildhall, led a SMU team that developed an app with nonprofit literacy provider Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT), and the team won $2.5 million in a competition hosted by the Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE.

BALANCED has a number of initiatives underway including:

• COVID 19 Research –BALANCED and the SMU-Intelligent Data Analysis lab are working together on a citizen science/crowdsourcing effort to encourage the video game community to donate spare computer processing power to find treatments to fight the COVID-19 virus. Thus far, 30 medications have been identified to test against the live virus.
• Fighting Age Related Macular Degeneration – In partnership with SMU, the Retina Foundation Southwest and Johns Hopkins, BALANCED deployed its HEWMEN enabled game, Eye in the Sky Defender (ESD), to train an algorithm to identify age related macular degeneration. HEWMEN’s integration of both humans and AI demonstrated an average improvement of 33.3% accuracy and 66.6% precision over standard AI techniques using an extremely small training data set.
• Crowdsourcing in an Industry first Streaming Event – Partnering with Complexity Gaming, BALANCED launched AI/ML problem on Amazon’s Twitch using HEWMEN with esports. “Race to World First”, an esports event, lasted 10 days in which 10 streaming channels broadcasted for 16 hours each day. During breaks in the tournament, “Omega Cluster,” BALANCED’s HEWMEN enabled game, was played for 928 hours. This game sorts compounds to that are used for treatment of resistant, recurrent breast and prostate cancer. The game’s players provided over 115 days, or 23 full time work weeks, of cancer data analysis in those 10 days of playing World of Warcraft.
• Chemotherapeutic Drug Discovery – BALANCED is working with computational biologist John Wise, Ph.D., of Southern Methodist University’s Drug Discovery Lab, for finding co-medications to enhance the effect of chemotherapy in the treatment of recurrent, resistant breast and prostate cancers.

About BALANCED | Media Technology

BALANCED is a purpose-driven artificial intelligence (AI) company that crowdsources human interaction and intuition through HCG to bring purpose to play. At present, BALANCED is focused on changing the way researchers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies leverage machine learning (ML) to advance the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. By crowdsourcing artificial intelligence through online communities and gaming via its HEWMEN platform, BALANCED hopes to aid researchers in investigating new treatments by creating AI-enabled technologies that reduce research time and cost and increase research effectiveness. BALANCED, a 2019 and 2020 Tech Titan winner that has been recognized as an industry innovator by multiple groups including the Dallas Business Journal and Dallas Innovates, is also creating the 8 CELL video game that aids in medical/health education and research. Headed by founders in data science, computing, video game development and the medical/healthcare industries, the company is based in McKinney, Texas, and can be found online at balancedmediatechnology.com.

Contact: Lori Mezoff / press@bmt.world