Chan, Zuckerberg Philanthropy Taps UMass Amherst to Create AI Scientific Research Tool

A philanthropy started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan has awarded a $5.5 million grant to the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Data Science to create a free tool that would make millions of published scientific and medical findings easily accessible to researchers worldwide.

The project, called Computable Knowledge, would use a branch of artificial intelligence known as knowledge representation and reasoning to create a navigable map of scientific findings from millions of new and historical research articles. The project aims to help scientists stay current on new research and to make it easier to find previously unknown connections between findings in genetics, diseases, drugs, and treatments.