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Facebook
founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged US$3
billion over the next decade to help banish or manage all disease ©John MacDougall
(AFP)
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A charitable foundation backed by Mark Zuckerberg
and his wife said Monday it has bought a Canadian artificial intelligence
startup as part of a mission to eradicate disease.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not disclose
financial terms of the deal to acquire Toronto-based Meta, which uses AI to
quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to
researchers.
Meta capabilities will be unified in a tool made
available for free to scientists.
"We are very excited about what lies
ahead," Meta co-founder and chief executive Sam Molyneux said in a
statement.
Zuckerberg and his doctor wife, Priscilla Chan,
in September pledged US$3 billion over the next decade to help banish or manage
all disease, pouring some of the Facebook founder's fortune into innovative
research.
"This is a big goal," Zuckerberg said
at a San Francisco event announcing the effort of the philanthropic entity
established by the couple in 2015.
"But we spent the last few years speaking
with experts who think it is possible, so we dug in."
In the field of biomedicine alone, thousands of
research papers are published daily, initiative science president Cori Bargmann
and chief technology officer Brian Pinkerton said in a post on the charity's
Facebook page.
Meta artificial intelligence can analyze insights
across millions of papers, finding connections and patterns at scales and
speeds impossible for humans to match unassisted, according to Bargmann and
Pinkerton.
"Meta will help scientists learn from
others' discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed,
or even predict where their field is headed," Bargmann and Pinkerton said.
"The potential for this kind of platform is
virtually limitless."
- AI at home -
Zuckerberg said last month that he built an
artificial intelligence-imbued software "butler" -- named Jarvis --
that even plays with his family.
The Facebook chief took on the personal project
last year, devoting about 100 hours to making a system inspired by "Iron
Man" film character Jarvis as a virtual assistant to help manage his
household.
Jarvis is not a physical robot, but an
application Zuckerberg can access through his phone or computer to control
lights, temperature, music, security, appliances and more.
The software learns his tastes and patterns, as
well as new words or concepts, and can even entertain his one-year-old daughter
Max, according to Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg plans to continue improving Jarvis,
and says he expects AI technology to improve greatly in the coming five to 10
years.
AI is getting a foothold in people's homes,
starting with devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers that link to
personal assistants to answer questions and control connected devices.
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| Image Source/Credit: Facebook/CZI |
Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative Acquires And Will Free Up Science Search Engine Meta
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s US$45
billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for
scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science
research papers. The Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered research search engine startup, and
will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing the product.
Meta could help scientists find the latest papers
related to their own projects, while assisting funding organizations to
collaborate with researchers and identify high-potential areas for investment
or impact. What’s special about Meta is that its AI recognizes authors and
citations between papers so it can surface the most important research instead
of just what has the best SEO. It also provides free full-text access to 18,000
journals and literature sources.
Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that “Going forward, our intent is not to
profit from Meta’s data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to
those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the
benefit of the world.”
CZI did not disclose any of the terms of its
acquisition of the Toronto-based startup’s tech and team, which was founded in
2010 and funded with US$7.5
million by investors, including Rho
Canada Ventures and HIGHLINEvc. The startup formerly charged some users for
subscriptions or custom solutions, but now the whole Meta product will be free.
The acquisition will take some time to close first, though.
Cori Bargmann, president of Science, and Brian
Pinkerton, president of Technology for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, explain
how Meta could be used, writing:
The potential for this kind of platform is
virtually limitless: a researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging
techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could
see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and
clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments
sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for
example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to
better understand how children learn.
The acquisition aligns with CZI’s US$3 billion investment toward curing all disease. It’s
already established the Biohub in
San Francisco, which will host and fund medical research. Announced in
September, one of the Chan Zuckerberg Science division’s goals is to build
tools and technology for medical experts, along with bringing them together and
building a larger movement for scientific progress.
In this case, because Meta has already
established itself as a leader in the aggregation of research, it made sense to
buy the company and distribute its tool rather than build something new.
Zuckerberg and his wife’s organization have also made investments in startups
as part of CZI’s Education push, including Andela,
which preps African engineers for tech jobs, and Byju’s,
an Indian video learning platform.
By taking Meta out of the commercial space and
refocusing ans maximizing its value, CZI could solve one of science’s biggest
problems for a much wider community. Simply put, there’s far too much research
for any one scientist or even a whole team to keep up with. 2,000-4,000 papers
are published each day about biomedicine alone, yet it’s hard to search across
them or figure out which are the most reputable.
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| Image Source: Tech Crunch |
Meta, formerly known as Sciencescape, indexes entire repositories
of papers like PubMed and crawls the web, identifying and building profiles for
the authors while analyzing who cites or links to what. It’s effectively Google
PageRank for science, making it simple to discover relevant papers and prioritize
which to read. It even adapts to provide feeds of updates on newly published
research related to your previous searches. Here’s how it assists different
parts of the research community:
· Scientists can find the latest data and
analysis on their areas of research, determine experiments that have already
been performed that they don’t need to replicate and find new opportunities for
investigation
· Funding organizations like universities and
foundations can get in touch with authors to back their future work, or spot
trends of where breakthroughs are being made so they can funnel resources
correctly
· Students can ditch shallow Google searches
that rely on exact term matches and SEO to rank results, and instead find
papers that are most relevant to their research and are from commonly cited
established scientists
· Schools can ensure their curriculum are up
to date and training students for the areas of science with the most potential
for advancement
When originally announced, the flexible LLC
status of the CZI was criticized because it diverged from the traditional
structure of a charity. But the ability to acquire for-profit companies like
Meta or reapply money it earns to its cause is exactly why Zuckerberg chose to
form the philanthropic vehicle this way.
“Helping scientists will produce a virtuous
cycle, as they develop new tools that in turn unlock additional opportunities
for faster advancement” Molyneux writes. “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s
recognition of this “meta” effect is why Meta can be a key piece of the
puzzle”.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative knows that even with the family’s massive fortune, it can’t fund every dimension of science. But if it can provide scalable tools that make every scientist more effective by freeing their creators from the hunt for profit, CZI can become a fulcrum for humanity.
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