The Howard Hughes Medical Institute today announced AI@HHMI, a $500 million investment over the next 10 years to support artificial intelligence-driven projects in the life sciences. As the largest private biomedical research institution in the United States, HHMI aims to pursue the full potential of AI to accelerate scientific discovery at its Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and at more than 300 HHMI-affiliated laboratories.
“By bringing human curiosity and artificial intelligence closer together at every stage of experimentation and data collection, we hope to enable a wide range of scientific advances at our Janelia Research Campus and HHMI laboratories across the country,” said HHMI President Erin O'Shea.
AI@HHMI will be based at Janelia but will foster AI-focused collaboration across the broader HHMI community. Through this effort, hundreds of HHMI scientists will help design and execute a wide range of ambitious AI-based biomedical research projects.
AI@HHMI will take a research approach called “AI-in-the-Loop,” which puts AI at the center of the scientific process to accelerate discovery and drive an explosion of knowledge about the complexities of life. AI systems will help design experiments, build automated pipelines, collect high-quality “AI-ready” data, and create generalizable learning models that can infer underlying principles within that data.
“Our scientists are reimagining the research process,” says Janelia Executive Director Nelson Spraston. “As always at HHMI, people are at the center of this effort: multidisciplinary teams work together to design, execute and interpret experiments. By sharing our tools and results, we aim to transform and accelerate the discovery process at HHMI and around the world.”
HHMI's Janelia Research Campus has been at the forefront of AI-driven research applied to biology for 15 years. Janelia scientists have built machine learning systems to tackle a wide range of challenges in the life sciences, and Janelia previously partnered with Google to apply AI systems to biology through its Connectomics group and DeepMind. These efforts have led to a variety of important breakthroughs, including the first detailed map of the adult fly brain (external link, opens in a new tab), a groundbreaking technological achievement (external link, opens in a new tab) with direct implications for neuroscience research.
“Janelia's unique strength is the close collaboration between theorists, experimentalists, computational scientists and engineers, which allows us to develop theoretical and computational models and collect high-quality experimental data to train and validate them,” said Stephan Saalfeld, Janelia Senior Group Leader and Head of Computational and Theoretical Division.
As part of this first phase of investment, AI@HHMI is inviting proposals for AI-based research projects led by HHMI researchers, Freeman Hrabowski Scholars and Janelia Group Leaders through October 4, 2024. Selected projects will be fully funded by HHMI and executed at Janelia in collaboration with HHMI laboratories and a new team of AI scientists, AI engineers, robotics engineers and data scientists.
More information about AI@HHMI is available online.
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HHMI is the largest private biomedical research institution in the United States. Our scientists make discoveries that advance human health and fundamental understanding of biology. We are also invested in transforming science education into a creative, inclusive endeavor that reflects the excitement of research. HHMI is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.
