Dario Gil for WEF’s “COVID Action Platform”–Scientific Discovery Must be Redefined and Quantum & AI Can Help

(WorldEconomicForum) Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research, has contributed an essay to for the The World Economic Forum’s COVID Action Platform. IQT News has summarized here and urges readers to click through and review the complete essay.
To shift the paradigm of scientific discovery, we need to enable AI, hybrid cloud, and — eventually — quantum computing to converge. We also need a second ingredient – new types of scientific collaborations or ‘communities of discovery’ — to be added to the mix.
What would we gain? An accelerated scientific method, fit for catalysing major transformations in science, and with unprecedented speed and automation. We could design new materials faster than ever before, impacting all aspects of our lives — from healthcare to manufacturing, to agriculture and beyond.
For the first time, closing the loop in scientific discovery seems a very real and imminent possibility. When it does happen, we will have achieved the dream of scientific advancement being a self-propelled and never-ending process.
science is becoming more open, with researchers from private and public sectors increasingly sharing papers, experiments, data, results and resources.
One successful example of such a smaller, new community of discovery is the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. A collaboration of 87 partners from academia, industry and national labs, it has been granting researchers from around the world who are fighting the current pandemic access to supercomputers.
Industry partners are often rivals, but not in the current coronavirus vaccine endeavour. Every member of the Consortium is united by a common goal: to accelerate our search for a new treatment or vaccine against COVID-19.
With continuing evolution as an AI-accelerated approach that builds on data, advanced compute in hybrid cloud, progress in quantum computing and growing communities of discovery, the upgraded, self-propelled continuous scientific method should greatly impact multiple aspects of our lives. And with all the global crises of today and tomorrow, the need for it has never been greater.