Lightning Talk: Building Ersilia: Open Source AI Modeling for Infectious Disease Research in the Global South
Lightningat Open Source Summit Europe 2023 · on Tuesday, 2023-09-19· at 11:25· Room 3F (3JAUREGIA - Floor 3), Abandoibarra Etorb., 4, 48011 Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain·
summary
An open source nonprofit builds GPLv3 tools and a pretrained Ersilia Model Hub of molecular embeddings, activity predictors and chemical space explorers for antimicrobial drug discovery, focused on low resource settings. Development runs on volunteer contributions with automated GitHub Actions workflows and DigitalOcean hosting, supported by internships like Outreachy ($7,000 grants). The project reports ~5,000 commits, about 70 code contributors, active malaria model work, capacity building workshops, and peer reviewed publications in Nature.
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