AI4Life Community Event Celebrating AI Innovation in Life Sciences held in Helsinki

May 28, 2025 – Helsinki, Finland — The AI4Life project, a Horizon Europe-funded project advancing artificial intelligence (AI) in life science research, and its coordinator Euro-BioImaging ERIC organised a community event on May 27–28, 2025, at Katajanokan Kasino in Helsinki. 

AI4Life brings together researchers, developers, infrastructure providers, and industry stakeholders from across Europe to accelerate the use of AI in biological and biomedical imaging. Over the course of two days, the event showcased cutting-edge AI tools, impactful research collaborations, and the vibrant community that AI4Life has fostered. 

Highlights included interactive workshops for both life scientists and AI developers, offering hands-on sessions with the BioImage Model Zoo (BMZ)—a platform hosting ready-to-use pre-trained AI models for microscopy image analysis. Attendees explored how to make image data and annotations standardised and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), with colleagues from the BioImage Archive. The BioImage Archive hosts AI-ready datasets that have been benchmarked using AI models from the BMZ. On the infrastructure side, BioEngine was shown to deploy AI models on-premise.

AI4Life Community event

The event also brought together experts from other communities that AI4Life collaborates with, such as the Global BioImage Analysts’ Society  (GloBIAS), in which several AI4Life members are volunteers, and AI4EOSC, a European project that has worked in the interoperability of AI models and that is hosting the AI4Life Cloud Marketplace.

Participants also learned about real-world applications from the AI4Life open calls use cases, such as 3D electron microscopy for plankton research and resolution-enhancement techniques in intravital microscopy. The Finnish Advanced Microscopy Node (FiAM) also promoted its image analysis capabilities. Success stories from the industry partner Zeiss and community contributors, like BiaPy, QuPath, and SpotMAX, demonstrated the project’s impact on both academia and industry.

The event concluded with a forward-looking discussion on the strategic role of research infrastructures, with presentations from EMPHASIS ERIC and EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC on the evolving landscape of European Open Science and AI policy. The discussion emphasised AI4Life’s contributions to interoperability and responsible data sharing.

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101057970), AI4Life has laid essential foundations for the future of open, AI-driven science. The tools, datasets, and knowledge produced by AI4Life will continue to benefit the global research community via platforms like the BioImage Model Zoo and the BioImage Archive.

For more information about the project, visit: AI4Life project overview; AI4Life website.