Today, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced the establishment of 11 new NSF National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, building on the first round of seven institutes funded in 2020. The combined investment of $220 million expands the reach of these institutes to include a total of 40 states and the District of Columbia.
The institutes are focused on AI-based technologies that will bring about a range of advances: helping older adults lead more independent lives and improving the quality of their care; transforming AI into a more accessible “plug-and-play” technology; creating solutions to improve agriculture and food supply chains; enhancing adult online learning by introducing AI as a foundational element; and supporting underrepresented students in elementary to post-doctoral STEM education to improve equity and representation in AI research.
“I am delighted to announce the establishment of new NSF National AI Research Institutes as we look to expand into all 50 states,” said National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “These institutes are hubs for academia, industry and government to accelerate discovery and innovation in AI. Inspiring talent and ideas everywhere in this important area will lead to new capabilities that improve our lives from medicine to entertainment to transportation and cybersecurity and position us in the vanguard of competitiveness and prosperity.”
Led by NSF, and in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Google, Amazon, Intel and Accenture, the National AI Research Institutes will act as connections in a broader nationwide network to pursue transformational advances in a range of economic sectors, and science and engineering fields — from food system security to next-generation edge networks.
“In the tradition of USDA-NIFA investments, these new institutes leverage the scientific power of U.S. land-grant universities informed by close partnership with farmers, producers, educators and innovators to provide sustainable crop production solutions and address these pressing societal challenges,” said USDA-NIFA Director Carrie Castille. “These innovation centers will speed our ability to meet the critical needs in the future agricultural workforce, providing equitable and fair market access, increasing nutrition security and providing tools for climate-smart agriculture.”
The new awards, each at about $20 million over five years, will support 11 institutes spanning seven research areas:
- Human-AI Interaction and Collaboration
- AI for Advances in Optimization
- AI and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure
- AI in Computer and Network Systems
- AI in Dynamic Systems
- AI-Augmented Learning
- AI-Driven Innovation in Agriculture and the Food System.
The focus of the 11 National AI Institutes are listed below:
NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups. Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), the institute, also known as AI-CARING, will seek to create a vibrant, fully developed discipline focused on personalized, longitudinal (over months and years) collaborative AI systems that learn individual models of human behavior and how they change over time and use that knowledge to better collaborate and communicate in caregiving environments. The collaborative AI Partners in Care developed as part of this institute will help support a growing population of older adults sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across the care network.
This institute is partially funded by Amazon and Google.
NSF AI Institute for Advances in Optimization. Led by Georgia Tech, this institute will revolutionize decision-making on a large scale by fusing AI and mathematical optimization into intelligent systems that will achieve breakthroughs that neither field can achieve independently. The institute will create pathways from high school to undergraduate and graduate education and workforce development training for AI in engineering that will empower a generation of underrepresented students and teachers to join the AI revolution. It will also create a sustainable ecosystem for AI, combining education, research, entrepreneurship, and the public at large. The institute will demonstrate foundational advances on use cases in energy, resilience and sustainability, supply chains, and circuit design and control. It has innovative plans for workforce education and broadening participation, including substantial leadership from a collaborating minority-serving institution.
This institute is partially funded by Intel.
NSF AI Institute for Learning-Enabled Optimization at Scale. Led by the University of California San Diego, in collaboration with five other universities across the nation, this institute, also known as TILOS, will aim to “make impossible optimizations possible” by addressing the fundamental challenges of scale and complexity. Learning-enabled optimization will be applied in several technical focus areas vital to the nation’s health and prosperity, including semiconductor chip design, robotics and networks. The research agenda is accompanied by plans for workforce development and broadening participation at all academic levels, from middle school to advanced research levels, including community outreach efforts to promote AI.
This institute is partially funded by Intel.
NSF AI Institute for Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment. Led by the Ohio State University, this institute, also known as ICICLE, will build the next generation of cyberinfrastructure that will make AI easy for scientists to use and promote its further democratization. It will transform the AI landscape of today by bringing in scientists from multidisciplinary backgrounds to create a robust, trustworthy and transparent national cyberinfrastructure that is ready to “plug-and-play” in areas of societal importance, such as “smart food sheds”, precision agriculture and animal ecology. The institute will develop a new generation of the workforce, with sustained diversity and inclusion at all levels.
This institute is fully funded by NSF.
NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence. Led by the Ohio State University, this institute, also known as AI-EDGE, will leverage the synergies between networking and AI to design future generations of wireless edge networks that are highly efficient, reliable, robust and secure. New AI tools and techniques will be developed
to ensure that these networks are self-healing and self-optimized. Collaboration over these adaptive networks will help solve long-standing distributed AI challenges making AI more efficient, interactive, and privacy preserving for applications in sectors such as intelligent transportation, remote health care, distributed robotics and smart aerospace. It will create a research, education, knowledge transfer and workforce development environment that will help establish U.S. leadership in next-generation edge networks and distributed AI for many decades to come.
This institute is partially funded by DHS.
NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next-generation Networks. Led by Duke University, this institute, also known as Athena, will focus on developing edge computing with groundbreaking AI functionality while keeping complexity and costs under control. Bringing together a world-class, multidisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, statisticians, legal scholars and psychologists from seven universities, it will transform the design, operation and service of future systems from mobile devices to networks. It is committed to educating and developing the workforce, cultivating a diverse next generation of edge computing and network leaders whose core values are driven by ethics and fairness in AI. As a nexus point for the community, this institute will spearhead collaboration and knowledge transfer, translating emerging technical capabilities to new business models and entrepreneurial opportunities.
This institute is partially funded by DHS.
NSF AI Institute for Dynamic Systems. Led by the University of Washington, this institute will enable innovative research and education in fundamental AI and machine learning theory, algorithms and applications specifically for safe, real-time learning and control of complex dynamic systems. The core motivation for this institute is to integrate physics-based models with AI and machine learning approaches, leading the way towards data-enabled ethical, efficient, and explainable solutions for real-time sensing, prediction, and decision-making challenges across science and engineering.
This institute is partially funded by DHS.
NSF AI Institute for Engaged Learning. Led by North Carolina State This institute is fully funded by NSF.
NSF AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education. Led by the Georgia Research Alliance, this institute, also known as ALOE, will lead the country and the world in the development of novel AI theories and techniques for enhancing the quality of adult online education, making this mode of learning comparable to that of in-person education in STEM disciplines. Fundamental research in use-inspired AI is grounded in theories of human cognition and learning supported by evidence from large-scale data, evaluated on a large variety of testbeds, and derived from the scientific process of learning engineering. Together with partners in the technical college systems and educational technology sector, ALOE will advance online learning using virtual assistants to make education more available, affordable, achievable, and ultimately, more equitable.
This institute is partially funded by Accenture.
The USDA-NIFA Institute for Agricultural AI for Transforming Workforce and Decision Support. Led by Washington State University, this institute, also known as AgAID, will integrate AI methods into agriculture operations for prediction, decision support, and robotics-enabled agriculture to address complex agricultural challenges. The AgAID Institute uses a unique adopt-adapt-amplify approach to develop and deliver AI solutions to agriculture that address pressing challenges related to labor, water, weather and climate change. The institute involves farmers, workers, managers and policy makers in the development of these solutions, as well as in AI training and education, which promotes equity by increasing the technological skill levels of the next-generation agricultural workforce.
This institute is funded by USDA-NIFA.
The AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture. Led by Iowa State University, this institute, also known as AIIRA, will transform agriculture through innovative AI-driven digital twins that model plants at an unprecedented scale. This approach is enabled by advances in computational theory, AI algorithms, and tools for crop improvement and production for resiliency to climate change. In addition, AIIRA will promote the study of cyber-agricultural systems This institute is funded by USDA-NIFA.
Learn more about the NSF AI Research Institutes by visiting nsf. For more on NSF’s investments in AI, see the NSF Science Matters article, “Expanding the geography of innovation: NSF AI Research Institutes 2021.”
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Check out NSF’s Interactive AI Map (the interactive pdf requires Adobe Reader).
