The launch of DashAI: Open-source AI platform receives FONDEF IDeA R&D 2025 funding
Building, understanding, and controlling artificial intelligence models without the need for programming knowledge: this is the goal of DashAI, the interactive, open-source tool that was selected in the FONDEF IDeA R&D 2025 competition.
"These funds seek to promote the development of technologies that generate impacts in the country at the productive, economic, and social levels," explains Felipe Bravo Marquez, project leader, academic at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile, and researcher at IMFD and CENIA.
"Until now, DashAI has been driven mainly by students and technical support from researchers at the National Artificial Intelligence Center (CENIA). However, with financial backing from FONDEF, the project will take a turn toward more professional development, forming a development team dedicated to ensuring the robustness, scalability, and usability of the platform, "explains Bravo, who is also director of IDIA, the Data and Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile.
Enable advanced AI use
DashAI seeksto make it easier for companies, organizations, and users without technical training to explore, train, and deploy artificial intelligence models, from data loading and analysis to production, all through an intuitive graphical interface accessible from any web browser.
The tool was designed with the diversity of current tasks in artificial intelligence in mind, covering tabular data processing, natural language processing, and exploratory functionalities in generative AI, such as open language models and image generators.
The project team is led by Felipe Bravo Márquez as director, alongside Claudia López, an academic at the Federico Santa María Technical University as alternate director, and Andrés Carvallo, a CENIA researcher. The main beneficiary institution of IDeA I+D is the University of Chile, while CENIA acts as a secondary institution. The team also has the support of Unholster, a company with a strong focus on applied data science, and the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data IMFD).
Cutting-edge proposal
The researchers behind this project decided to base its development on two fundamental pillars, with the aim of enabling the model's usability for a large number of People organizations: No-Code, which enables People technical training to work with AI effectively, and Control, which allows decisions to be made about where models are executed, how data is stored, and includes tools for traceability, explainability, and replicability, strengthening the transparency of the process.
"In a scenario where these technologies are often in the hands of large global companies, DashAI proposes a local, open, and accessible solution that boosts our digital sovereignty and promotes a more equitable and transparent adoption of artificial intelligence, "explains the project director.
DashAI seeks to establish itself as a strategic resource for Chile, promoting digital sovereignty in a context where the value of artificial intelligence tends to be concentrated in large international technology companies. The initiative aims to strengthen local capabilities, reduce dependence on foreign technologies, and facilitate autonomous data management and protection, positioning itself as a public and accessible solution for national technological and productive development.
