The ranking changed
Ars Technica reports that after an investigation Nikon concluded the winning video by Ning Xu of Tsinghua University did not comply with the rules of the Small World in Motion competition. The new winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam. The video shows a tiny roundworm and a single-celled organism.
Xu's video showed tiny cilia beating in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disorder. Ars had covered that winning video last month. After allegations, Nikon investigated.
[1]
The objections and Xu's account
According to a BBC report, some researchers were concerned that the video had structural abnormalities, and that cell features appeared and disappeared in a way one would not see in actual cellular biology. Others saw what looked like AI watermarks in the source files.
Xu said he used AI to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images. He denied that AI was used to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion.
[1]Nikon's statement
Nikon wrote that, after re-evaluating the video and supporting materials and consulting judges, it determined the winning video did not comply with the competition rules on generative AI, and that it had adjusted the rankings on its website.
The statement says the decision concerns only whether the submitted video was eligible under the rules. It should not be read as a judgment of the entrant's professional reputation, scientific contributions, or intent. Nikon says the episode shows that Small World and Small World in Motion need to revisit rules and evaluation procedures for later entries.
The places that moved up are Benedikt Pleyer of Bavaria, Germany, in second; Andrew Moore of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States, in third; Patrick Hickey of Hypha Research in Edinburgh, Scotland, in fourth; and Igor Adameyko in fifth. Ars does not quote the rule text, and it did not test the watermarks itself.
[1]