Bill Gates sponsors $1M AI Alzheimer's prize
Bill Gates is funding a $1 million (€857,000) competition to encourage the use of artificial intelligence in discovering innovative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, marking his latest effort to harness the promising technology in the search for cures to some of humanity's most challenging illnesses.
The Alzheimer’s Insights AI prize will be awarded to the team that comes up with the most original way to programme AI-powered agents that are “capable of independent planning, reasoning, and action to accelerate breakthrough discoveries from existing Alzheimer’s data”, News.Az reports citing foreign media.
The winning tool will be released for free on the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative’s cloud “workbench” to be used by scientists globally, the organisation said on Tuesday. The prize is being financed by Gates Ventures, the family office of the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder.
Researchers hope that AI can uncover new insights that might have been missed via autonomous analysis of the vast troves of disparate patient information gathered from decades of research into the most common type of dementia.
It is estimated that 55 million people suffer from dementia, with the number forecast to triple by 2050 as the world’s population ages.
“We all recognise the burden of Alzheimer’s disease and that’s only going to get worse,” said Gregory Moore, a senior adviser at Gates Ventures. “We haven’t seen the novel treatments come to market with the sense of urgency that we’re demanding.”
“Unless you’ve been living under a rock, AI is a real thing and the scientific establishment needs to take advantage,” he said, by using specialised agents as “teammates” able to plan, reason and generate hypotheses.
The contest comes amid rising competition in Silicon Valley to develop AI models that can help diagnose medical problems, develop new drugs and cure degenerative diseases and cancer.
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