DreamLab

DreamLab is a specialist free app, developed by Vodafone Foundation Australia, that uses the processing power of smartphones to help analyse complex data while their owners sleep, to speed up cancer, coronavirus and climate-change research.

While traditional experimental research and standard research methods could take years to develop, the mobile cloud-based processing approach of DreamLab enables our partner Imperial College London to drastically reduce the time taken to analyse the huge amount of data that exists. A desktop computer running 24-hours a day would take decades to process the data, but a network of 100,000 smartphones running overnight could do the job in just a couple of months.

In 2022, we launched a new ‘Tropical Cyclones’ project. As climate change intensifies, extreme weather events are becoming commonplace. Imperial College London are building the world’s largest public database of simulated tropical cyclone events, to understand the risk of tropical cyclones and if/how climate change is making their impact worse.

In April 2020, following the COVID-19 outbreak, a Corona-AI project launched on the app, which uses the same technology to help in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

The project combines artificial intelligence and the processing power of idle smartphones to speed up the discovery of novel anti-viral components in existing medicines and help the hunt for anti-viral molecules in foods. The app works by creating a network of smartphones to power a virtual supercomputer, capable of processing billions of calculations, without collecting or disclosing users’ location data. No personal data is downloaded to or processed from the user’s device.