CLEVELAND, Ohio — IBM and Meta (formerly Facebook) have created a new group called the AI Alliance, and the Cleveland Clinic is one of its many founding members.
The group consists of more than 50 organizations from several countries and supports open innovation and open science in AI, short for artificial intelligence. According to IBM’s blog post, the alliance is designed to “create opportunities everywhere through a diverse range of institutions that can shape the evolution of AI in ways that better reflect the needs and the complexity of our societies.”
Goals include pushing responsible development of AI, supporting research and developing educational content that would inform the public and policymakers.
Members of the AI Alliance include the Cleveland Clinic, Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale, Cornell, technology companies such as Dell and government institutions like NASA.
Dr. Lara Jehi, Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Research Information Officer, said in a statement that the hospital system would be a leading healthcare voice in the new group.
“The robust biomedical research environment in the Lerner Research Institute, our extensive clinical research expertise across our global health system and the computational innovation of our Center for Computational Life Sciences offers an ideal ecosystem to develop and test open source AI technologies applicable to healthcare and medicine,” Jehi said.
CEO and President Tom Mihaljevic said in a statement that the Clinic recognizes that AI has the potential to accelerate the pace of medical research and enhance patient care.
“AI capabilities are now constantly growing and improving, and it is critical that organizations from diverse fields come together to help advance AI discoveries and technologies while also addressing concerns around security and safety,” Mihaljevic said. We are looking forward to working on these important issues collaboratively with the Alliance members.”
IBM and Cleveland Clinic agreed on a 10-year partnership, called the Discovery Accelerator, focused on advancing biomedical research through the use of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
Earlier this year Cleveland Clinic and IBM unveiled the IBM Quantum System One, an advanced quantum computer that can handle large amounts of data at lightning speeds. It lives on the Clinic’s main campus and is the first quantum computer in the world uniquely dedicated to healthcare research.
