AI Centre Presents FLIP at Cambridge Federated AI Workshop

From Zero to Hero: Federated AI in Healthcare Systems — Cambridge, 24–25 August

Rafael Garcia-Dias, Senior AI Engineer on Federated Learning, represented the AI Centre at From Zero to Hero: Federated AI in Healthcare Systems, a two-day workshop held at the Old Divinity School, St John’s College, Cambridge, and sponsored by Flower Labs. Convened by organisers from the University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Exeter, PharosAI, Munster Technological University and Flower Labs, the programme combined keynotes, research talks, live demonstrations and hands-on tutorials, with keynotes from André Dekker (Maastricht UMC+ and Maastro Clinic), Mark Durkee (Government Digital Service) and Carsten Maple (University of Warwick).

Rafael gave a live demonstration, FLIP: a reusable, general-purpose open-source FL platform, walking through the platform end to end — federated cohort discovery across participating sites, per-site project approval, data preparation and annotation inside each hospital’s secure enclave, and federated training runs monitored from a central hub. The emphasis was on reusability. FLIP is deliberately general-purpose and backend-agnostic, supporting both NVIDIA FLARE and Flower, so that new studies can be onboarded onto infrastructure that already exists rather than each project standing up its own federation from scratch.

He then joined the workshop’s closing panel, Scaling out: the limits of federated AI in healthcare today, and where it goes next, chaired by Nicholas Lane (Flower Labs) alongside Olaoluwa Ademolu (Barts Health NHS Trust / PharosAI), Carsten Maple (University of Warwick) and Bing Luo (Duke Kunshan University). The discussion returned repeatedly to a theme familiar from our own deployments: the hard part of federated learning in healthcare is rarely the algorithm, but the governance, infrastructure and institutional trust required to get a model running across several hospitals at once.

View Rafael’s presentation slides via this link here.