CZI Partners with UMass Center for Data Science to Accelerate Science and Medicine

Editor’s Note: This release has been updated as of 11/2/21.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has announced a new partnership with professor Andrew McCallum, director of the Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on a new research project that has the potential to make faster breakthroughs in the fight against disease.  

The goal of this project, called Computable Knowledge, is to create an intelligent, navigable and highly visual map of scientific knowledge using a branch of artificial intelligence known as knowledge representation and reasoning.

Today, over 1 million research papers are published every year in biomedicine – one new paper every 30 seconds – making it difficult for scientists to see the whole picture and how it all fits together. The Computable Knowledge project will facilitate new ways for scientists to explore, navigate, and discover potential connections between millions of new and historical scientific research articles. Once complete, the service will be accessible for free through Meta.

“The biomedical research landscape is growing and changing daily, as researchers publish their findings in journals around the world. It is a daunting amount of information for any scientist to take in, let alone learn from and build upon,” said Priscilla Chan MD, co-founder of CZI. “To address this challenge, we’re collaborating with Andrew McCallum and his lab at the UMass Center for Data Science to build an AI-driven map of scientific knowledge. By uncovering patterns between different areas of research, Computable Knowledge could potentially point scientists in new directions for their experiments.”

Andrew McCallum has published more than 150 scientific papers on this subject, and is the second-most cited researcher in the entire field of natural language processing. We are building a team of AI scientists to collaborate on the project, and have made an initial grant of $5.5 million to the UMass Center for Data Science.

“We are honored to partner with Andrew, learn from his expertise, and work with him to build this tool that will help scientists work faster,” said Cori Bargmann, Head of Science for CZI. “We hope it will lead to more breakthroughs that can help us cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”

By Jeff MacGregor, Director of Communications, Science