Over the past 3 years, AI4Life has launched a series of three annual Open Calls to support life scientists facing unmet image analysis needs. 

These calls invited scientists working with biological or microscopy images to propose analysis problems where deep learning makes a difference. Proposals were selected based not just on novelty, but on broader impact, reusability, and feasibility. 

What each Open Call offered

• Technical support and collaboration: Project experts provided guidance on the development of analysis workflows, data improvement and deep learning solutions.
• Consultation phase (from Open Call 2 onward): Before full project selection, top applicants engaged in a consultation phase to assess data readiness, existing methods’ suitability, and possible quick wins. In some cases, the consultation itself was enough to resolve issues.
• Public dissemination: At the end of each project, the developed workflows, some subset of data, and trained models were made publicly available (e.g. via the BioImage Model Zoo or open archives).
• Potential elevation into public challenges: Projects selected via the Open Calls addressing common needs could be turned into public challenges, inviting more involvement from the computational community to improve or benchmark solutions.