Pressrelease: Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare - CLAIRE and HIPPO AI Join forces to work towards open Medical AI resources

THE HAGUE/BERLIN, Jan. 10, 2022  -- Hippo AI Foundation & Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CLAIRE)

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CLAIRE and Hippo AI Foundation will collaborate to support each other's activities and to create joint activities that benefit the European AI research and open medical AI ecosystems.

Recently, CLAIRE shared the stage with Hippo AI for the German AI Award ("Deutscher KI-Preis"), awarded by WELT, with CLAIRE receiving the Innovation Award for groundbreaking achievements in the research and development of AI for CLAIRE, and Hippo AI the AI ​​Start-Up Prize. The two organisations have now joined forces to enable the free flow of data and information, to facilitate AI knowledge and its use where it is most needed; their common goal is to ensure that communities of AI experts, practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs, as well as citizens and notably patients have access to medical AI resources, such as data and pre-trained, clinically validated models.

First joint activities are already planned and include:

• mutual support of projects of common interest, through letters of support, feedback/input on project proposals;
• joint research and development projects, in which members of both organisations participate and for which the partners jointly (possibly together with other stakeholders) secure funding;
• coordination and alignment of activities and messaging aimed at European policymakers in the areas of AI, data and health.

-- AI is poised to transform medicine and healthcare, to enable new ways of diagnosing, treating and preventing disease. It is crucial that these advances, as well as the knowledge and data enabling them, will be broadly accessible, rather than limited to a few large commercial players. By joining forces with Hippo AI Foundation, we aim to facilitate the creation of a world-class open medical AI ecosystem in Europe, with benefits to European citizens, companies and the AI research ecosystem, says Holger Hoos, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at RWTH Aachen University and Professor of Machine Learning at Leiden University (The Netherlands) as well as Chair of the Board of CLAIRE.

-- Data is like the oxygen that fuels the fire of the digital economy, but it can equally be the water that extinguishes the inequalities in health. Whereas some people and organisations decided data to be the fire, the Hippo AI Foundation focuses on using it as water to progress AI research that benefits all, while protecting the digital sovereignty of Europe and its values, adds Bart de Witte, Founder of Hippo AI Foundation. Our collaboration with the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe, CLAIRE is an important step for us to build this new ecosystem and accelerate human-centred AI. CLAIRE brings together the best talent of all European AI research labs and is an excellent example of the power of a network. We are proud to work together towards European excellence in AI research and innovation, always with humans at the centre.

The parties are particularly interested in preserving privacy while eliminating the risk of re-identification for open data in healthcare (shareability) and enhancing data diversity, with the end goal of increasing the availability of global data and AI commons for the medical sector. In particular, Hippo AI and CLAIRE will work together to accelerate the availability of training, validation and test data sets, as well as the availability of synthetic datasets; increase the availability of pre-trained global and open AI-commons; build decentralised open medical AI collaboration networks, as well as centralised, federated and hybrid data architectures, and pipelines for medical AI modelling. Furthermore, they will explore new techniques for generating synthetic medical data and AI governance mechanisms for data and AI communities.

About CLAIRE:

CLAIRE (Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe, claire-ai.org) is an organisation created by the European AI community that seeks to strengthen European excellence in AI research and innovation, with a strong focus on human-centred AI. CLAIRE aims to establish a worldwide brand recognition for "AI made in Europe" (at the level of CERN), and to position Europe in control of its own future.

Launched in June 2018, CLAIRE has the support of more than 3,900 people, most of them scientists, technologists, and researchers in AI. The supporters represent the vast majority of Europe’s AI community, spanning academia and industry, research and innovation. Among the supporters are more than 140 fellows from various key scientific associations. CLAIRE has opened administrative offices in The Hague, Saarbrücken, Prague, Rome, Brussels, Oslo, Paris and Zürich. Furthermore, nine advisory groups with 48 members from 18 countries have been established, covering all areas of AI, along with the topics of ethical, legal and social implications of AI.

CLAIRE's membership network consists of over 430 research groups and research institutions, covering jointly more than 24,000 employees in 37 countries. In addition, CLAIRE is in the process of setting up an industry network, in order to foster close links between non-profit research and impactful industrial applications.

The CLAIRE has received official letters of support from the governments of nine European countries, from over 30 scientific associations across all of Europe, from the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI, which is the key European association for AI researchers), from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI, the key international association for AI), and from the European Space Agency (ESA).

CLAIRE is also actively liaising, on an ongoing basis, with other important organisations, including ELLIS, the HumanE AI consortium, the Big Data Value Association, euRobotics and AI4EU, and cooperates closely with ESA.

About Hippo AI Foundation

The Hippo AI Foundation is a non-profit that accelerates the development of open-sourced medical AI by creating data and AI commons for the healthcare industry.

As an altruistic data trustee, Hippo AI unifies, cleanses, and de-identifies data from individual and institutional data donations. This means making data available without reward for open-source usage that benefits communities or society at large, such as the use of breast-cancer data to improve global access to breast cancer diagnostics.

The Hippo AI Foundation assists individuals in exercising their rights under Regulation (EU) 2016/679, in particular, managing their consent to data processing, their right to Right to Life  (EU Fundamental right Art 3), Right to Integrity (EU Fundamental right Art 3) and the Right to Healthcare (EU Fundamental right Art 35).

Hippo AI’s focus is to maximise the positive social impact of the application of AI in healthcare by de-economising data and leveraging its social value, reinventing the European social market economy by believing in economic growth and prosperity for all. Global data and AI commons (common goods) will improve health service coverage and health outcomes and consequently increase universal access to healthcare.

Contact:

Bart de Witte, Founder Hippo AI Foundation,
Tel: +49 173 6919511
E-Mail: bart(at)hippoai.org

Viktoria Prantauer, Co-Founder/Chief Patient Officer Hippo AI Foundation,
Tel: +43 664 307 3282
E-Mail: viktoria(at)hippoai.org

Prof. Dr. Holger Hoos, Chair of the Board of CLAIRE
Tel. +31 71 527 5777
E-Mail: hh(at)liacs.nl

Alexa Kodde, MSc, Project Coordinator CLAIRE,
Tel. +31 72 527 4799
E-Mail: contact(at)claire-ai.org