FCAI’s second term confirmed – Academy of Finland grants funding of up to 11 millions
The second term involves an increased focus on AI-assisted virtual laboratories, and boosting international collaboration with top AI researchers through ELLIS Unit Helsinki.
The Academy of Finland has today announced its funding for the second terms of its Finnish Flagship programs. The overall amount of funding reserved for the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI is up to over 11 million euros, of which a half has now been officially confirmed and the latter half will be granted early 2025.
“We are happy to hear about the continued Academy funding for FCAI operations”, says Samuel Kaski, the director of FCAI.
FCAI’s work on trustworthy, understandable and data-efficient AI continues with a now confirmed second term.
The second Flagship term lasts until the end of 2026. Overall, the Academy funding makes up only a fraction of FCAI’s overall budget of approximately 250 million euros.
“Coming close to the end of our first term, we can proudly say that FCAI is well on its way towards developing the kind of AI-assisted decision making, design and modeling that we originally set out to accomplish”, Kaski notes. “We have also created a broad and active ecosystem of partner companies and organizations, with which we bring the AI to benefit Finnish industry and society.”
For the second term, he explains that FCAI will continue to pursue its original goal and produce top-quality fundamental AI research. In addition, a new focus will be on setting up virtual laboratories, that is, computational environments of a number of fields, and developing AI tools that can help transform research across the fields.
FCAI will also strengthen Finland's contribution to ELLIS (the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). FCAI hosts ELLIS Unit Helsinki, which is Finland's link to the network of excellence that brings together top AI researchers in Europe.
Read more about FCAI’s research focus: https://fcai.fi/news/2021/7/9/how-modeling-user-intent-could-revolutionize-what-we-can-do-with-ai