Microsoft Launches $ 40 Million Fund To Boost Health Research Using AI

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Microsoft announced the "AI for Health" program on January 29, 2020. Its goal is to find new cures for diseases that affect large numbers of people and try to bring them to the benefit of developing countries. "It is imperative to focus on health inequalities to improve access to care for disadvantaged populations"said John Kahan, head of data analysis at Microsoft. Namely, the" AI for Health "program is the fifth program for" Microsoft AI for Good ", a $ 165 million initiative to replace the human at the heart of new technologies.

A $ 40 million fund

Planned over five years, this $ 40 million fund is intended to benefit non-profit organizations, researchers and healthcare industry. They will have access to the technologies developed by the American firm, in particular artificial intelligence and cloud computing tools as well as "certain financial grants".

The "AI for Health" program is also based on partnerships. Microsoft will, for example, partner with the Seattle Children's Research Institute to try to understand the causes of sudden infant death syndrome or with the Foundation Novartis to work on leprosy.

"AI for Health" focused on three key areas: accelerating medical research to advance disease prevention and treatment, a deeper understanding of mortality and longevity, and reducing inequalities in health care. 'Health care access. Microsoft takes the example of diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease that causes blindness. 463 million people are currently suffering from it worldwide. Computer vision, one of the branches of artificial intelligence, could make it possible to detect the first signs of the disease in order to administer the appropriate treatments as quickly as possible.

Protect health data by encryption

Aware of the issues, the Redmond company indicates that health data will be treated with respect for privacy. "We work hard to provide privacy technologies based on work done by Microsoft and academics, called differential privacyJohn Kahan said. Differential privacy is a way of "encrypting" information because simply removing a user's name from their data isn't enough to make them anonymous. It's easy to re-identify a person in a data set using specific mathematical calculations. This method injects a signal that will, in a way, confuse the tracks enough to prevent overlapping of information.

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