C3.ai, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and multiple universities have partnered to release two major initiatives: C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute and C3.ai DTI First Call for Research Proposals, C3.ai announced on Thursday.
“The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute is a consortium of leading scientists, researchers, innovators, and executives from academia and industry, joining forces to accelerate the social and economic benefits of digital transformation,” said Thomas Siebel, CEO of C3.ai. “We have the opportunity through public-private partnership to change the course of a global pandemic. I cannot imagine a more important use of AI.”
The collaborative group announced the topics for Research Awards, including applying machine learning and other AI methods to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Genome-specific COVID-19 medical protocols, such as precision medicine of host responses, and biomedical informatics methods for drug design and repurposing.
Additional topics include design and sharing of clinical trials for collecting data on medications, therapies and interventions, modeling, simulation, and prediction for understanding COVID-19 propagation and efficacy of interventions, and logistics and optimization analysis for design of public health strategies and interventions, and more.
Up to $5.8 million in awards will be funded from this first call, ranging from $100,000 to $500,000 each. In addition to cash awards, C3.ai DTI recipients will be provided with significant cloud computing, supercomputing, data access and AI software resources and technical support provided by Microsoft and C3.ai.
The partnership will include unlimited use of the C3 AI Suite and access to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and access to the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC.
C3.ai DTI will focus its research on AI, Machine Learning, IoT, Big Data Analytics, human factors, organizational behavior, ethics and public policy. The Institute will support the development of ML algorithms, data security and cybersecurity techniques.
C3.ai DTI research will analyze new business operation models, develop methods of implementing organizational change management and protecting privacy, and amplify the dialogue around the ethics and public policy of AI.
“As we launch this exciting private-public partnership, we’re enthusiastic about aiming the broader goals of the Institute at urgent challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on longer-term research that could help to minimize future pandemics,” said Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientist at Microsoft and C3.ai DTI Advisory Board Member.
C3.ai announced that the first call for proposals is now open, with a deadline of May 1, 2020. Researchers have been invited to learn more about C3.ai DTI and how to submit their proposals for consideration at C3DTI.ai. Selected proposals will be announced by June 1, 2020.
About C3.ai
C3.ai is a leading AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation. C3.ai delivers the C3 AI Suite for developing, deploying, and operating large-scale AI, predictive analytics, and IoT applications in addition to an increasingly broad portfolio of turn-key AI applications. The core of the C3.ai offering is a revolutionary, model-driven AI architecture that dramatically enhances data science and application development.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
