This month, Microsoft is celebrating our fiftieth anniversary. To assist commemorate fifty years of making expertise that empowers individuals to realize extra, our AI for Good Lab launched an open name to assist revolutionary AI-based tasks right here in Washington State.
Our AI for Good Lab has been utilizing AI to sort out world challenges and enhance lives since 2018. We open-source our fashions, knowledge, and instruments so everybody can leap in, working collectively to make actual influence. At a time when nonprofits, NGOs, and tutorial establishments are tasked with doing extra with much less, expertise like AI provides a approach ahead.
By means of these awards, we’re investing $5 million over the subsequent two years. This open name permits us to broaden our commitments to a variety of wonderful tasks whereas participating a variety of latest organizations throughout the state of Washington. The 20 awardees will obtain Microsoft Azure credit and the flexibility to collaborate with AI for Good Lab scientists.
We’re thrilled to proceed to domesticate relationships with revolutionary companions on this nice state and the world at massive. These game-changing organizations and tasks usually are not solely serving to resolve as we speak’s challenges, they’re additionally paving the way in which for a brighter tomorrow. We’re honored to share the next as our 2025 open name awardees.
Sustainability
- Awardee: Inventory-Good.com – Washington State College Extension
Undertaking description: Washington State’s federal, state, tribal, and personal land managers and livestock grazers are all starting to make use of digital fence programs to fine-tune ecological grazing administration. Inventory-Good.com combines predicted livestock terrain use with satellite-based forage manufacturing knowledge to tell grazing plans for livestock herds. By utilizing AI-guided interpretation of digital fence system geolocation knowledge, Inventory-Good.com helps scale back wildfire threat, improve wildlife habitats, and enhance invasive species management. - Awardee: Lengthy Stay the Kings
Undertaking description: Within the Puget Sound, the impacts of speedy urbanization are compounded by local weather change. Lengthy Stay the Kings employs AI and machine studying to routinely calibrate a 3D ecosystem modeling program for Puget Sound. This venture will use the emulator to discover how cumulative watershed impacts have an effect on ecosystem companies and biodiversity to advance pure useful resource administration in Puget Sound. - Awardee: TealWaters
Undertaking description: TealWaters works to rework Washington State’s water administration capability by offering instruments that inform and information wetlands plannTealWaters plans to assist AI mannequin testing past the scope of its present instruments to enhance communities’ resilience to local weather change and environmental stressors. - Awardee: Washington State College
Undertaking description: Local weather change places residents of Washington State at greater threat of harmful wildfires. This venture will develop cutting-edge AI fashions, fusing satellite tv for pc imagery, climate knowledge, constructing info, and wildfire simulation outcomes to evaluate wildfire vulnerability of residential buildings in Washington State. By producing vulnerability assessments that embrace confidence scores, this multi-modal strategy may help information efficient wildfire mitigation efforts. - Awardee: Cornell College, Round Building Lab
Undertaking description: Reusing supplies is the best round financial system technique: it reduces waste and emissions, creates native inexperienced jobs, and assists native reuse ecosystems. AR3-Lumber goals to develop and implement AI-powered expertise to reuse salvaged lumber via a neighborhood partnership with the Seattle Salvaged Lumber Warehouse. This venture will allow AR3-Lumber to supply important technical and methodological assist to the round lumber financial system. - Awardee: Woodland Park Zoo
Undertaking description: The Seattle City Carnivore Undertaking goals to extend our understanding of and empathy for city carnivores comparable to black bears by learning how these species stay and work together with individuals throughout the larger Seattle area. This venture will embrace a wildlife digital camera and bioacoustics monitoring program that collects knowledge from inexperienced areas throughout central King County and Bainbridge Island, using AI to determine the variety and density of species in city corridors in a approach that’s environment friendly and consumes fewer assets. - Awardee: Conservation X Labs
Undertaking description: Conservation X Labs goals to stop the sixth mass extinction by creating and democratizing revolutionary applied sciences to vary what’s attainable in conservation. The venture will develop and deploy a multi-species administration detection algorithm on a sensible digital camera system to create a first –of –its –form, real-time monitoring system for illness in wildlife that may be utilized by veterinarians, ecologists, and conservationists throughout Washington State. - Awardee: NOAA-Nationwide Marine Fisheries Service – Habitat Conservation
Undertaking description: Present strategies of water administration and salmon habitat restoration within the Columbia River Basin are typically both hyper-localized or computationally intensive. This venture goals to use distant sensing and machine studying to categorise wetlands to higher predict how water administration selections and local weather change influence salmon populations and assist simpler conservation methods. - Awardee: Info Communication and Know-how for Improvement (ICTD) on the College of Washington
Undertaking description: Extra plant and animal species are threatened with extinction now than at some other time in human historical past. The Info Communication and Know-how for Improvement division on the College of Washington plans to monitor wildlife utilizing audiovisual channels on tiny compute gadgets, fostering a greater understanding of animal populations intricately linked to meals security, illness unfold, and biodiversity.
Well being
- Awardee: Info Communication and Know-how for Improvement (ICTD) on the College of Washington
Undertaking description: Extra plant and animal species are threatened with extinction now than at some other time in human historical past. The Info Communication and Know-how for Improvement division on the College of Washington plans to monitor wildlife utilizing audiovisual channels on tiny compute gadgets, fostering a greater understanding of animal populations intricately linked to meals security, illness unfold, and biodiversity. - Awardee: Windfall
Undertaking description: Present strategies for figuring out sufferers for scientific trials depend on handbook screening processes that miss many sufferers—particularly these from underserved communities—or depend on sick sufferers and their docs to do the work of looking for accessible trials. Windfall and Microsoft Well being Futures are collaboratively creating Trial Join, an AI software that scans population-level medical knowledge throughout Washington State to determine sufferers who qualify for scientific trials that might save their lives. - Awardee: Institute for Well being Metrics and Analysis
Undertaking description: Knowledge from the Institute for Well being Metrics and Analysis (IHME) are utilized by greater than 13,000 researchers around the globe. IHME plans to construct a worldwide cloud laboratory to look at well being regionally, utilizing satellite tv for pc imagery, AI, and spatial demography to predict dangers like drought and meals insecurity to particular populations. This venture goals to put actionable, inhabitants-level well being knowledge into the arms of decision-makers to enhance people’ well being and properlybeing. - Awardee: College of Washington Radiology
Undertaking description: To enhance public well being and assist sufferers of their most difficult moments, the College of Washington created self-improving massive language fashions to translate radiology report findings into patient-friendly language. Sufferers will obtain clear, lay-language explanations of their imaging outcomes whereas healthcare suppliers present suggestions that will likely be used to refine the mannequin, making certain steady enchancment, lowering misunderstandings, and fostering higher communication between sufferers and medical professionals. - Awardee: Institute for Protein Design – College of Washington
Undertaking description: Generative AI has already had a big influence ion protein construction prediction and protein design. This venture goals to develop no less than three specialised, open-source fashions, together with a next-generation biomolecule design mannequin, a mannequin specialised for antibody/antigen construction and antibody design, and a mannequin specialised for protein/ligand interactions to allow the subsequent era of therapeutics and biomaterials. - Awardee: Washington State College Division of Chemistry
Undertaking description: Heavy and radioactive metallic contamination in Spokane and Hanford threatens group well being. This venture will leverage geochemistry and huge language fashions to construct a publicly accessible dataset that may help in designing efficient soil decontamination strategies for Spokane and Hanford, contributing to a cleaner, more healthy setting for Washington residents.
Training/Public Good
- Awardee: Washington State College
Undertaking description: Rural elementary lecturers in Washington usually wrestle to design high-quality science assessments as a result of limitations round assets, skilled improvement alternatives, and entry to expertise. This venture will develop and deploy an AI-powered multi-agent evaluation system to empower rural Washington elementary lecturers and improve accessibility, engagement, and tutorial effectiveness. - Awardee: Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington
Undertaking description: Rising labor and enterprise prices have decreased the flexibility for Evergreen Goodwill to advance their mission of offering high quality, free job coaching and primary schooling to individuals experiencing vital obstacles to financial alternative. The venture will use an AI-powered automated donation ingestion and cataloging system to sort out the backlogged volumes of donated items obtained by Evergreen Goodwill. By doing so, the venture will scale back waste, enhance effectivity, and unlock new alternatives for scale and profitability. - Awardee: Washington State College – Group Argumentation Coordinator
Undertaking description: This venture gives science lecturers in Washington State with an AI-powered software known as a Group Argumentation Coordinator that will scale back the burden on overwhelmed lecturers and enhance college students’ studying expertise in science school rooms throughout the state. The venture promotes real-time assist for argumentation-based science studying in numerous school rooms. The 2-year plan supported by this award focuses on system improvement, small-scale classroom pilots, and instructor suggestions integration to make sure usability, equity, and transparency. - Awardee: Washington State College – WARNS
Undertaking description: The Washington Evaluation of Threat and Wants of College students (WARNS) has successfully assessed the wants vital to wholesome social, emotional, and academic improvement of center college and highschool college students throughout the state. This venture will develop an elementary-level model of this evaluation, leveraging massive language fashions to scale back absenteeism and forestall dropouts amongst elementary college college students by initiating a dialogue with college students about what they should thrive within the classroom. - Awardee: Huge Brothers Huge Sisters of Puget Sound
Undertaking description: The Puget Sound department of Huge Brothers Huge Sisters is confronted with the problem of a 100 –day-lengthy waitlist for households trying to take part of their mentorship program. By means of a partnership with KPMG and Microsoft, Huge Brothers Huge Sisters developed an AI software, AIMRE, to course of massive datasets on their waitlist and enhance each the standard and timeliness of youth/mentor matches. This award will enable Huge Brothers Huge Sisters to conduct additional testing and deploy AIMRE regionally, finally scaling nationally to hurry up the matching course of for youths throughout the nation.
We’re thrilled to assist these 20 tasks of their efforts to harness the transformative energy of AI to resolve challenges throughout Washington State and past.