A "dream team" of researchers from Berkeley and several other universities -- including the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Princeton, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon -- is working on a new $367 million public-private research consortium with the artificial intelligence firm C3.ai to find A.I. solutions to global problems. The first goal of the 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. "AI is the perfect weapon to point at this problem and say, 'How can we contain this thing before it overwhelms us,'" says Thomas M. Siebel, the founder and chief executive of C3.ai, who is backing the project along with Microsoft Corp. "All of the work that's being done goes into the public domain. It will be available to everybody in the world under nonexclusive royalty free licensing." Stories on this topic have appeared in more than 400 sources around the world, including The Scientist.