An AI on-demand platform to support research excellence in Europe
The goal of the project is to develop an open EU platform for AI research. The rapid advancement of AI technologies has led the EU to decide on hosting a research environment focused on scientific and ethical excellence, which grows with the cooperation of members from within the EU and the assistance of academia and industry. The EU-funded AI4EUROPE project, in collaboration with AI4EU and other related projects, aims to develop this space by introducing an unbiased, open and cooperative platform from and for the European research community for excellent studies of AI. This platform will provide services ranging from data access, services and tools to cooperation with other researchers. The project will also enable a business model for guaranteeing its continued operation.
Objective
Europe is implementing an AI strategy that seeks to create a research environment characterised by scientific excellence and consistent with the fundamental ethical values of its citizens. Part of this strategy foresees the consolidation of ongoing research activities through the creation and maintenance of an AI on-demand Platform that will act as a community resource for the research community, facilitating experimentation, knowledge sharing and the development of state-of-the-art solutions and technologies. AI4Europe builds on the work of AI4EU and multiple supporting projects (ICT-48/ICT-49), creating an open, impartial, and collaborative Platform, built by the European research community according to their needs. 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 and those in widening countries. The project will develop and implement a business model that will ensure the long-term technical and financial structures providing sustainability for the Platform beyond the lifetime of the project. AI4Europe will support the community to create a tool that will help position Europe as the place where the very best AI research is conducted.
UiT's role in the project
The two research groups Open Distributed Systems (ODS) and Health Data Lab (HDL) from the Department of Computer Science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) are both contributors to the project. Our main contributions are in the two work packages Tools to support AI research community (WP4, main contribution from the HDL research group) and AI supportive physical environments (WP5, main contribution from the ODS research group). In WP4 our goal is to make available public (Norwegian) data accessible for ML models and AI research. This includes process to (automatic) prepare and annotate data and produce the proper meta data for the data sets. In WP5 our goal is to investigate the usage of AI in 5G networks, in particular in edge servers in such network. This includes demonstration of applications and application infrastructures in such settings.
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