The AI4Life project held its 2nd General Assembly on October 9th and 10th, 2023, bringing together computational experts and life scientists from various fields to discuss the project’s progress and future goals. 

The assembly opened with a welcome from the Euro-BioImaging director, John Eriksson and Euro-BioImaging Bio-Hub director, Antje Keppler.

Anna Kreshuk and Florian Jug, the AI4Life Scientific Coordinators, discussed AI4Life’s objectives, including democratizing AI-based methods, establishing standards for submission, storage, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data and models. They also highlighted the need for open calls and empowering common platforms with AI integration. 

The keynote speaker was Gergely Sipos, who presented “Computing and AI in EOSC”, discussing opportunities for collaboration. Sipos emphasized the role of EGI, an international e-infrastructure for research and innovation, and its mission to provide computing power, data storage, and training services to the scientific community. He also introduced iMagine, another Horizon Europe-funded project that makes heavy use of EGI resources. Together, AI4Life, iMagine, and EGI decided to explore ways to team up and re-use each others’ technology stacks.

The rest of the meeting was structured from two different angles:

1) Updates from partners: describing the interaction with each other, analysing dependencies within the project, summarising the activities during the first year, and the outlook for the one to come;

2) Updates from Work Packages: describing the goals, deliverables and milestones (submitted and upcoming), and the interactions between work packages. Special focus was given to the question of whether needs have changed since the grant for AI4Life was written. Work Packages also updated the audience with success stories, achievements, goal blockers, pain points, and challenges.

We would like to thank all the participants for their contributions and we are looking forward to an exciting second year of FAIR AI with AI4Life!