A project led by Michela Taufer, MathWorks Professor in the Tickle College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been awarded $9 million by the National Science Foundation. The project aims to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery by enabling researchers to securely discover, access, analyze, and share scientific data across the nation’s research infrastructure.
Taufer is leading a team of experts from UT, the University of Utah, Purdue University, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and MLCommons, with additional collaborating institutions from academia, national laboratories, and industry.
The sheer volume of data generated by modern scientific instruments requires significant computing power to find, retrieve, and analyze. Researchers must have access to high-performance computing infrastructure, and even then they may spend months moving and organizing data before they can use it. Collaborators may still not have access.
“The challenge is turning data into discoveries quickly enough to accelerate scientific innovation,” Taufer said. The solution must increase process efficiency while making advanced AI-driven science accessible to any researcher, regardless of their HPC resources.
“By lowering these barriers, we can enable every US researcher, educator, and student to contribute new ideas, improve reproducibility, and foster collaboration,” Taufer said. “Our goal is to transform scientific data into scientific decisions in real time.”
Learn more about the award and the benefits for scientific discovery.