What happens when the scale of UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UC San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Huawei congregate to form a powerful partnership? Breakthrough and transformative innovations and researches for the greater good, what else!
Making good on their promise to donate 99% of Facebook shares to charity during their lives, Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have collaborated with the likes of UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and UC San Francisco (UCSF), and committed a huge amount of $600 million to this effort. This amount would be invested in a new medical science research center- ‘Biohub’, which is dedicated to promote equality and advance human potential. It is headquartered next to the campus of UCSF’s Mission Bay and has a satellite site at Stanford. It is aimed at providing clinical scientists and researchers with a state-of-the-art laboratory, modern technological tools, and grant funds for ambitious research projects. These researches would eventually expand the breadth of human knowledge on health and diseases, and seek out new, viable avenues to cure them. Two research projects- The Cell Atlas and The Infectious Disease Initiative, would be immediately initiated by Biohub and are expected to be completed over a time period of five years.
In another quantum leap for science and technology, China’s Huawei has announced to form a strategic research partnership with UC Berkeley with an initial funding of $1 million which would focus its research on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The partnership between Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) and Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Laboratory would cover areas of machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning. While various competitors like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are already working on AI with fresh talents from different universities, Huawei has a long way to go. It has to race against time to keep up with the ever-evolving technological advancements to keep its business running. For now, though, it has taken its first step.
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