The European Commission has financed a consortium to develop the next phase of Europe’s strategically important artificial intelligence infrastructure known as the AI-on-demand (AIOD) platform.

Through the Horizon Europe Programme (Artificial Intelligence and Robotics), the AI4Europe project, led by Irish University College Cork (UCC) has been awarded €9 million to develop the platform. The consortium that includes an additional 23 partners from across 14 other European countries: Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.

The objective of the AI-on-demand platform is to bring together Europe’s AI community while promoting European values. The platform serves as a catalyst to aid AI-based innovation, resulting in new products, services, and solutions to benefit European industry, commerce, and society. By bringing people together, the community resource seeks to address the fragmentation of the European AI landscape and facilitate technology transfer from research to business. Initiated in 2019 with the support of the European Commission, the platform will continue to develop over the coming years through further investment that will see the platform add additional services and tools.

AI4Europe builds on the work of the AI4EU project, as well as an ever developing ecosystem of European-funded projects related to artificial intelligence. Equipped with the necessary hardware, the platform will offer interoperable services, data, and tools from several related communities and provide solutions to facilitate research productivity, reproducibility, and collaboration. AI4Europe will establish and support mechanisms to foster exchange between academia and industry and ensure the platform reaches out to and engages with the next generation of researchers, innovators, business, across Europe.

The Commission plans to invest €1 billion per year in AI, targeting to reach an annual investment of €20 billion over the course of the digital decade, mobilising additional investments from the private sector and the Member States.

The AI-on-Demand platform is a fundamental building block of the Commission strategy on AI, aiming at making Europe a world leader in human-centric and trustworthy AI.

Source: European Commission I Digital (https://bit.ly/3zRrAak)