Spread across several partner universities and co-funded by the Simons Foundation, a private foundation that funds scientific research, each institute will receive $20 million to support students and staff in building AI-powered tools for astrophysics and astronomy that will speed and deepen our understanding of the universe, according to a news release this week.
NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a public statement that these tools will be necessary to comb through the large data sets of astronomical projects, such as the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Rubin Observatory in Chile, a joint effort of NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) expected to start next year.
“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,” Panchanathan's statement read. “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.”
One of the national institutes will be based at the University of Texas at Austin and involve collaborations with the University of Utah, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Los Angeles, along with two other NSF programs. Called the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, it will use AI to better analyze and understand complex phenomena, such as the chemical processes of stars. The institute also plans to develop an AI assistant that can pull from published findings to answer astronomical questions.
The second institute will be based at Northwestern University in Illinois and involve collaborations with the University of Chicago; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Illinois, Chicago; and Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Called the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky, this center will use AI to gain insight into topics such as the physics of neutron stars and the role of dark matter in the universe.
Other objectives for both new institutes include workforce development and outreach activities, such as summer programs for high school students and teachers and online courses that will provide certification in AI-assisted astronomy.
These new research initiatives join 25 others in the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program, which launched in 2020 and now represents collaborations between more than 500 institutions worldwide, according to NSF's website.
