In a series of articles, Rosauro Varo Cobos offers his perspective on racism, colonialism and global health — In the last year, Rosauro Varo Cobos, paediatrician, researcher, aid worker, and writer, has extensively explored the ideas of decolonization in global health. His conclusions can be found in three enticing articles written in Spanish and published in El País, Frontera Digital, and Fundació Grífols’s website.

AI-powered creativity may reshape how scientists approach their work and think about themselves. Visual arts and creative writing provide early examples. — A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a course on creative writing with AI, facilitated in Spanish by the esteemed writer, podcaster, and cultural critic, Jorge Carrión. In his most recent publication, Los Campos electromagnéticos (The Electromagnetic Fields), Carrión co-writes with the GPT series, drawing a clear…

We have kick-started a project with H3D to identify genetic traits specific to African populations that determine variability in malaria and tuberculosis treatment — One thing I couldn’t anticipate was my sudden loss of interest in large language models. As an AI practitioner, the advent of astonishing tools like GPT-4, capable of generating convincing text in response to any prompt, should be a cause for celebration. Instead, I find these tools disenchanting and even…

Ersilia is joining the Barcelona Health Hub, a digital health center located in the architectural ensemble of Hospital de Sant Pau — I’ve seen the following verse by the Catalan poet J.V. Foix being overused, overemphasized and even butchered multiple times: M’exalta el nou i m’enamora el vell. I should probably be ashamed of using it once again — it is the type of cultural excerpt you learn at high school, so…

We have interacted with Bloom, an open source AI tool trained on a gigantic corpus of text, in search of insights into Global Health and our role as a non-profit organization — Samuel Volk & Miquel Duran-Frigola Fundraising for a charitable project requires tranquility, self-awareness and diligence. When you are trying to find your voice in Global Health while still struggling to understand your own principles, the available funding channels can be distracting, if not incompatible, with your ethical stance. You need…

We present a prototype of ChemXOR, a tool to build encrypted AI models for drug activity prediction — Our full registered name is ‘Ersilia Open Source Initiative’. We have participated in public community efforts such as the Open Source Malaria and the Open Source Antibiotics contests, we have enrolled in incubators programs at the Software Sustainability Institute, Open Life Science and Code for Science & Society, and we…

There is a poem by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa titled Viajar! Perder países! (Travelling! Losing countries! in English, I believe). I don’t know what Pessoa meant by that. I often struggle to catch meanings in poetry, more so in the case of Pessoa, who wrote behind all of those…

The Ersilia Open Source Initiative was incorporated as a charity in November 2020 with a very clear goal: to equip laboratories in the Global South with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for infectious and neglected disease research. …

I often go back to Enrique Vila-Mata’s 1985 short novel Brief history of portable literature. I like all Vila-Matas, but this is one of my favourites, although probably not his best. I enjoy its blend of absurdity and erudition, I suppose. “Portable literature” refers to the act of travelling with…