Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor S. Shankar Sastry is going to be co-directing a new $367 million public-private research consortium with the artificial intelligence firm C3.ai and other elite universities, to work on finding A.I. solutions to global problems. The first goal of the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, managed jointly by Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will be targeting ways to slow the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. "I cannot imagine a more important use of A.I.," says Thomas M. Siebel, the founder and chief executive of C3.ai, who is backing the project along with Microsoft Corp. According to this reporter: "The new institute will seek new ways of slowing the pathogen's spread, speeding the development of medical treatments, designing and repurposing drugs, planning clinical trials, predicting the disease's evolution, judging the value of interventions, improving public health strategies and finding better ways in the future to fight infectious outbreaks."