Artificial Intelligence vs. Coronavirus

A new consortium of leading scientists will be able to use the world's most advanced supercomputers to find solutions to virus problems.

Advanced computers have already managed to defeat grandmasters and have learned to analyze mountains of data, recognizing faces and voices. Now, the billionaire software and artificial intelligence developer is teaming up with leading universities and companies to find out if artificial intelligence can help curb current and future pandemics.

Thomas M. Siebel , founder and CEO of C3.ai , an AI company in Redwood City, California, said a public-private consortium would spend $ 367 million in its first five years of work to find success in finding a way to slow down a new coronavirus that spans the whole world.

“I can’t imagine a more serious reason to use artificial intelligence,” said Siebel in an interview.

Known as the “ Digital Transformation Institute C3.ai”(C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute), a new research consortium that includes the collaboration of Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft. The C3.ai Institute for Digital Transformation seeks to attract leading scientists to solve serious social problems with the help of artificial intelligence - its first problem is a pandemic.

The new institute will look for new ways to slow the spread of the pathogen, accelerating the development of medical methods of treatment, development and re-profiling of drugs, planning clinical trials, predicting the development of diseases, assessing the cost of interventions, improving health strategies and finding more effective ways to deal with infectious outbreaks that may occur in the future.

Condoleezza Rice, a former US Secretary of State serving on the board of directors of C3.ai and recently appointed as the next director of the Hoover Institution, which is a conservative think tank in the Stanford University system, called the initiative a unique opportunity to “better manage these phenomena and prevent the worst consequences for humanity.”

The new institute plans to provide up to 26 grants each year, each of which provides up to $ 500,000 in research funds in addition to computing resources. Leading researchers are required to be at the universities of the consortium, but allow partners and team members to work in other institutions. The Institute requested that proposals for coronavirus be submitted by May, and subsequently plans to provide its first grants in June. Research results should be made public.

The co-founders of the institute are S. Shankar Sastri from the University of California at Berkeley and Rayadurgam Srikant from the University of Illinois at Erbana Champaign. Computing resources will be provided by C3.ai and Microsoft, as well asThe Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , which is part of the University of California and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois . The schools have some of the most advanced supercomputers in the world. To the question whether the institute may not have practical results in the future, except prophylactics for improving well-being, Mr. Siebel answered: “The probability that nothing good will come of it is zero.”

In recent decades, many wealthy Americans have sought to portray themselves as patrons of social progress.through scientific research, in some cases surpassing what the federal government can achieve, because its goals are often monotonous and its budgets unpredictable.

Edition of Forbes evaluates the current status of Mr. Siebel 3.6 billion. His First Virtual Group is a diversified holding company that includes charities.

Mr. Siebel was born in 1952. He studied history and computer science at the University of Illinois and was a manager at Oracle Corporation before he founded Siebel Systems in 1993. Siebel Systems is the first in customer service softwareand in 2006 merged with Oracle. In 2009, Siebel founded the company C3.ai.

The first part of the company name, according to Mr. Siebel in the email, means the convergence of three digital trends: a large database, cloud computing and the ability to control physical objects via the Internet with the use of artificial intelligence that enhances their power. Last year, he set out his dissertation in the book Digital Transformation: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Mass Extinction. C3.ai works with clients on projects such as digital fraud and smart city building .

In an interview with Eric Horvitz, Microsoft's chief researcher, compared the desire to implement coronavirus solutions with the launch of a rocket toward the moon.
According to him, the strength of this approach lies in the unification of key parties and institutions. “We don’t take into account who is located geographically, and ask what we can do as a team,” said Dr. Horvitz.

To consider artificial intelligence as a good thing - perhaps a life saver - is the exact opposite of perceiving it as a phenomenon that inspires fear. Critics consider artificial intelligence to be dangerously powerful, even threatening to enslave humanity with robots with superhuman abilities.

“By no means do I claim that artificial intelligence is complete well-being,” said Siebel. But the new institution, he added, is "a place where it can become a force of good."

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