Housed at TED and supported by leading social impact advisor The Bridgespan Group, The Audacious Project is a collaborative funding initiative that's catalyzing social impact on a grand scale by convening funders and social entrepreneurs, with the goal of supporting bold solutions to the world's most urgent challenges. Among this year's carefully selected change-makers is Jim Collins and a team at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic), including co-principal investigator Regina Barzilay. The funding provided through The Audacious Project will support the response to the antibiotic resistance crisis through the development of new classes of antibiotics to protect patients against some of the world's deadliest bacterial pathogens. "The work of Jim Collins and his colleagues is more relevant now than ever before," says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "We are grateful for the commitment from The Audacious Project and its contributors, to both support and foster the research around AI and drug discovery, and to join our efforts in the School of Engineering to realize the potential global impact of this incredible work."

The Audacious Project commitment will support the development of new classes of antibiotics to treat the world's deadliest bacterial pathogens. Housed at TED and supported by leading social impact advisor The Bridgespan Group, The Audacious Project is a collaborative funding initiative that's catalyzing social impact on a grand scale by convening funders and social entrepreneurs, with the goal of supporting bold solutions to the world's most urgent challenges. Among this year's carefully selected change-makers is Jim Collins and a team at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic), including co-principal investigator Regina Barzilay. The funding provided through The Audacious Project will support the response to the antibiotic resistance crisis through the development of new classes of antibiotics to protect patients against some of the world's deadliest bacterial pathogens. "The work of Jim Collins and his colleagues is more relevant now than ever before," says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

It's amazing how quickly the conversations that I'm having with CIO colleagues and clients about artificial intelligence (AI) and/or machine learning (ML) have shifted in recent months. I've gone from hearing many say they're taking a "wait-and-see" approach to many suddenly wanting to get a jumpstart on the promise of these technologies. There's a lot of excitement about how much value can be garnered from an AI/ML implementation: Increasingly CIOs and IT leaders are chomping at the bit to implement something to show what they can do. The problem is many of them don't know where to start. Or worse yet, they want to start with an audacious project to show off what's possible.