National scale problems require the complete integration of multiple fields on knowledge and joint effort between academia, industry, government, and non-profits to solve them The Convergence Accelerator is a one and half year old program at the National Science Foundation that exists to fund the development of solutions to these problems.

NSF Convergence Accelerator – AI Innovation

The Convergence Accelerators track topics are based on NSF’s Ten Big Ideas and White House’s Industries of the Future. Topics are selected through grass roots efforts, engaging academics and stakeholders from government, industry, and non-profits to define the solutions sets and entities and knowledge domains necessary to address these issues.

Now into its second Cohort, track topics include: Open Knowledge Networks (OKN) (2019), Future of Work (2019), Quantum Technology (2020), and AI Innovation (2020). One of nine projects selected for Phase II of the program from 41 Phase II projects, the Precision Medicine OKN from UCSF will incorporate billions of factual relationships among biomedical concepts, providing a discovery engine that will enable doctors, researchers, the pharmaceutical industry and the citizen scientist to explore biomedicine in its whole might. Dr. Sergio Baranzini, the Principal Investigator for this project, will discuss how they will improve medicine, producing better outcomes for us all.