The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation will jointly fund two new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes for astronomical sciences.
The two institutes will each receive $20 million over five years — $10 million from NSF and $10 million from the Simons Foundation. They will become part of the NSF-led National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program, which was launched in 2020 and now includes 27 AI institutes across the nation.
“The massive amount of data that will be gathered in the coming years by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory and other large-scale astronomical projects is simply too vast and rich to be fully explored with existing methods,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan in a news release. “With reliable and trustworthy AI in their toolbox, everyone from students to senior researchers will have exciting new ways to gain valuable insights leading to amazing discoveries that might otherwise remain hidden in the data.”
“Astronomy has incredibly rich and open data sets and is poised for more deep and profound inquiry,” added Simons Foundation President David Spergel. “AI offers novel tools that can use this data both to produce transformative results and to develop tools that can have impact in other fields.”
Both institutes are expected to increase the capabilities of AI in general so it can become a more useful tool for researchers using large datasets in other disciplines.
The new AI Institutes for astronomical sciences are:
NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (NSF-Simons CosmicAI)
The University of Texas at Austin will lead this initiative in partnership with NSF NOIRLab, the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the University of Utah, the University of Virginia and UCLA.
At UT, the institute will involve eight departments with more than 17 faculty working in disciplines such as astronomy, computer science, statistics and data science, linguistics, information sciences, math, mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering.
NSF-Simons CosmicAI will attempt to accelerate traditionally time-consuming aspects of astronomical research like “processing and analyzing large amounts of data and creating and evaluating simulations of complex phenomena like the chemical processes within stars.”
“This is an exciting opportunity to advance our understanding and help answer some of the most fundamental questions about the universe. As part of our campus, NSF-Simons CosmicAI will drive discovery using AI, enabled by an incredible set of talented people and the largest GPU cluster in all of academia. And, through the Oden Institute, it will collaborate with eight scientific domains that are among the best in the country,” said UT President Jay Hartzell. “As astronomical data tend to be public and nonproprietary, CosmicAI aligns with our University’s mission to use open AI as an enabler for the public good. We are grateful for our partnership with NSF and the Simons Foundation to launch this institute.”
NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (NSF-Simons SkAI)
This institute is led by Northwestern University, which will collaborate with the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Chicago, the Adler Planetarium and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in addition to several undergraduate education and research institutions and industry and art organizations.
The team will bring multidisciplinary researchers together to develop new AI tools that will enable stronger analysis of large astronomy datasets and more robust physics-based simulations.
“I am thrilled to receive this opportunity to work with our amazing cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional team, so we can accelerate the data-driven revolution that wide and deep sky surveys will bring to the field of astronomy,” said Northwestern astrophysicist Vicky Kalogera, the principal investigator of the grant. “We will transform our astrophysical understanding across an enormous range of scales — from stars and the transients they produce to the evolving galaxies they live in, the black holes they form, and the dark sector of the universe and its cosmological origins.”
Both institute will also train early-career researchers and students and conduct various outreach activities to disseminate their discoveries and techniques. That outreach will include summer schools for high school students and teachers and the development of online courses allowing scientists and students to earn certification in the field of AI-assisted astronomy.