Virginia Tech has been awarded a U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot award. The collaborative nature of the pilot seeks to bring together academia, industry, nonprofit and government sectors, with a focus on promoting cross-sector partnerships.
The award was for Anuj Karpatne’s project “Lake-GPT: Building a Foundation Model for Aquatic Sciences”. This is one of the first 35 projects to be supported with computational time through the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot programme.
Karpatne, who is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and core faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, was among 10 award recipients invited to speak at a White House event hosted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy on Opportunities.
This occurred at the White House’s AI Research Frontier, which took place on May 6, 2024. This event was used to announce the launch of the NAIRR Pilot programme.
Karpatne was also one of two recipients invited to give longer talks on their NAIRR projects at the AI Expo for National Competitiveness in Washington, D.C. This event was hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.
Karpatne is undertaking important ecological-based studies, using the AI capability of the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to model the quality of water in lakes and reservoirs across the U.S.
A second group of NAIRR Pilot awards, announced in late May, include Debswapna Bhattacharya, associate professor of computer science, and Xuan Wang, assistant professor of computer science and core faculty at the Sanghani Center.
Bhattacharya is using the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to supercharge foundational AI models for pandemic prediction. The research line that Wang is pursuing uses the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Neocortex as the allocated resource.
This awards scheme marks a significant milestone in connecting U.S. researchers and educators to computational, data, and training resources needed to advance artificial intelligence.
The NAIRR Pilot awards are a joint effort led by the National Science Foundation in collaboration with other U.S. federal agencies. The idea of the prize is a result of President Joe Biden’s landmark Executive Order on the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI.
The second objective is to provide researchers and students access to key AI resources and data.
All NAIRR Pilot awardees are supported for six months and have access to advanced computing systems funded by the National Science Foundation or supported by the Department of Energy for their AI research.
