AI4Europe, a consortium of European partners committed to improving Europe’s global ranking in the artificial intelligence (AI) field, has secured €9m (£7.8m) from the European Union to develop infrastructure designed to bring together Europe’s AI community.
The AI-on-demand Platform project and AI4Europe, its sponsor, officially began during its kickoff meeting at the University College Cork (UCC) on the 6 and 7 of September.
AI4Europe is a project funded by the European Commission and 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 includes 23 further partners across 15 European countries.
The AI-on-demand Platform was established in 2019 to serve as a catalyst for AI-based innovation, products, services and solutions for the benefit of European industry, commerce and society.
Professor Barry O’Sullivan, director of insight at UCC and coordinator ofAI4Europe, said: “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. The plan is for the platform to offer interoperable services, data and tools from a network of communities and provide solutions to facilitate research productivity, reproducibility and collaboration.
The programme also intends to develop mechanisms to foster exchange between academia and industry and to ensure its AI platform engages with the next generation of researchers, innovators and businesses throughout Europe.
