CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe, launched its COVID-19 Initiative in March 2020 as the first wave of the pandemic hit the continent. Its objective was to coordinate volunteer efforts from its members to contribute to tackling the effects of the disease. The taskforce was able to quickly gather a group of about 150 researchers, scientists and experts in AI organized into seven topic groups: epidemiological data analysis, mobility data analysis, bioinformatics, medical imaging, social dynamics monitoring, robotics, and scheduling and resource management. We brought you a comprehensive article about the activities of this initiative in one of last month's AI for Good series posts. You can read more about the outcomes and experience of this bottom-up approach in the article: The CLAIRE COVID-19 Initiative: a bottom-up effort from the European AI community.

CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe, launched its COVID-19 initiative in March 2020 as the first wave of the pandemic hit the continent. Its objective is to coordinate volunteer efforts of its members to contribute to tackling the effects of the disease. The taskforce was able to quickly gather a group of about 150 researchers, scientists and experts in AI organized in seven topic groups: epidemiological data analysis, mobility data analysis, bioinformatics, medical imaging, social dynamics monitoring, robotics, and scheduling and resource management. Activities of these groups yielded multiple outcomes including a publicly released resource on COVID-19 related data for drug-repurposing; the development the COVID-19 Infodemic Observatory to track spread of misinformation in social media and tools for the diagnosis based on CT scans using High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. The latter was the catalyst for establishing a partnership between CLAIRE, the Italian National Inter-University Consortium for Informatics (CINI) and the Associazione Big Data (ABD) to provide HPC-enabled AI technologies to our network members.

Anne-Sophie Taillandier: To create a platform bringing together the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community and embodying European values: sovereignty, trust, responsibility, transparency, explainability… AI4EU seeks to make AI resources, such as data repositories, algorithms and computing power, available for all users in every sector of society and the economy. This includes everyone from citizens interested in the subject, SMEs seeking to integrate AI components, start-ups, to large groups and researchers--all with the goal of boosting innovation, reinforcing European excellence and strengthening Europe's leading position in the key areas of artificial intelligence research and applications. AST: It primarily plays a federating role. AI4EU, with 79 members in 21 EU countries, will provide a unique entry point for connecting with existing initiatives and accessing various competences and expertise pooled together in a common base. It will also play a watchdog role and will provide the European Commission with the key elements it needs to orient its AI strategy.