AI-on-demand Platform (LINK) and the project that sponsors it, AI4Europe, had their official start during the project kickoff meeting, which took place at the University College Cork (UCC) on the 6th and 7th of September.
AI4Europe is a project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme which runs until the end of 2025. It is coordinated from UCC by Professor Barry O’Sullivan, Dr. Gabriel Castane-Gonzalez, Shaun Gavigan, and Tanvir Badwal, of the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics and School of Computer Science and Information Technology. With UCC, the consortium comprises an additional 23 partners across 15 European countries.
AI-on-demand Platform, powered by AI4Europe, serves as a catalyst to aid AI-based innovation, resulting in new products, services, and solutions to benefit European industry, commerce, and society. By bringing people together, the community resource seeks to address the fragmentation of the European AI landscape and facilitate technology transfer from research to business. Initiated in 2019 with the support of the European Commission, the platform will continue to develop over the coming years through further investment that will see the platform add additional services and tools.
According to Professor Barry O’Sullivan, Director of Insight at UCC and AI4Europe Coordinator, “The AI-on-demand platform is a critically important strategic infrastructure and ecosystem to ensure that Europe is at the cutting edge of AI. Through the dissemination of research expertise and results, and through the adoption of AI technologies in industry and the public sector, we will support the uptake of trustworthy AI in Europe.”
AI4Europe builds on the work of the already finished AI4EU project, as well as on an ever-developing ecosystem of European-funded projects related to artificial intelligence. Equipped with the necessary hardware, the platform will offer interoperable services, data, and tools from several related communities and provide solutions to facilitate research productivity, reproducibility, and collaboration. AI4Europe will establish and support mechanisms to foster exchange between academia and industry and ensure the platform reaches out to and engages with the next generation of researchers, innovators, and businesses across Europe.
Professor John O’Halloran, President of UCC, states that: “We are grateful and proud that the European Commission has entrusted the leadership of this project with us at UCC. As the academic home of George Boole, we are delighted to see our continued leadership in the underpinnings of AI recognised through this strategically important project.”