Amii and New Harvest Announce Research Collaboration

Amii and New Harvest are leading a research collaboration focused on applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in cellular agriculture.

This collaboration will result in open and accessible assets to drive the intersectional domains of cellular agriculture and AI forward — with the first public presentation on the work scheduled for Upper Bound on May 23 - 26, 2023 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The project is supported by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.

Research project commitments include: 

• Publication surveying opportunities in the field, continuing upon the initial work of New Harvest Research Fellow Zachary Cosenza and Dr. Michael Todhunter, will be written in collaboration with Amii Scientist, Dr. Ruchika Verma. 
• New Harvest Research Fellow, a cross-appointment to New Harvest and Amii’s Advanced Technology program, who will tackle one of the most pressing challenges identified in the survey publication.

Cellular agriculture is the production of animal products from cell cultures rather than from animal husbandry. With sufficient technological advancement, cellular agriculture has the potential to dramatically reduce the environmental and public health impacts of our food system.

Currently, there is limited academic literature on the various applications of AI and ML in cellular agriculture; in addition, industrial progress in the field is subject to intense IP protection restricting the opportunity for new startup formation. This creates immense barriers to growth of the field that has the potential to have a massive impact on global sustainable development areas including climate action, zero hunger, clean water and sanitation.

This collaborative project will embrace New Harvest’s mandate to default to open—making assets associated with this collaboration accessible for all to use, reuse, redistribute and build upon in order to maximize impact. This will build roads to new discoveries by co-creating the shared canon of knowledge needed to drive collective progress in the field. 

"At Amii, we are proud to collaborate with next generation science visionaries to see the promise of AI realized in new domains and applications," says Cam Linke, CEO of Amii. "With the vast economic and technical challenges facing the field of cellular agriculture, this collaborative project is a path forward to take tangible steps towards unlocking the potential exponential impact of AI in this field."

"The close collaboration between the experimental community at New Harvest and the world-leading computational research community at Amii is necessary to take advantage of the role that AI and ML can play in accelerating cellular agriculture," says Isha Datar, Executive Director of New Harvest. "The unique model of both organizations is poised to leverage our strengths to rapidly accelerate the opportunity to advance the field with the ultimate goal of seeing real-world applications."

About Amii

One of Canada’s three centres of AI excellence as part of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, Amii (the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) is an Alberta-based non-profit institute that supports world-leading research in artificial intelligence and machine learning and translates scientific advancement into industry adoption. Amii grows AI capacity through advancing leading-edge research, delivering exceptional educational offerings and providing business advice – all with the goal of building in-house AI capabilities. For more information, visit: amii.ca.

About Schmidt Futures 

Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. It is a philanthropic initiative that brings talented people together in networks to prove out their ideas and solve hard problems in science and society. To learn more about Schmidt Futures methods and the diverse types of capital and tools that it deploys, visit: schmidtfutures.com

About New Harvest 

New Harvest is a nonprofit research institute that supports open, public cultured meat research. Founded in 2004, New Harvest is the world’s longest-running organization dedicated to advancing the field of cellular agriculture. To learn more about New Harvest’s work, visit: new-harvest.org