Two new artificial intelligence centers announced by the National Science Foundation on Wednesday will focus on astronomy, with the goal of using emerging technology to advance human understanding of the universe.
The centers, which will be funded by NSF and the Simons Foundation, add to 26 existing AI centers nationwide. Each new center will receive $20 million over five years, down to $10 million from the NSF and $10 million from the Simons Foundation, according to a press release from the center.
“Astronomy has very rich and open data resources and is committed to deep and deep research,” David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, said in a statement included in the release. “AI provides new tools that can use this data to produce transformative results and develop tools that can have an impact in other fields.”
The two new institutes will be called NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, abbreviated NSF-Simons CosmicAI, and NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky, abbreviated NSF-Simons SkaI. According to the release, the work of these institutes will also not be limited to developing AI for astronomy alone.
“Both institutes are committed to advancing the capabilities of AI beyond astronomy to become an essential tool for all scientific disciplines involving large databases, advanced models and iterative processes- in the process of developing and testing ideas,” according to NSF.
NSF Simons CosmicAI, for its part, will be led by the University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with the University of Utah, the University of Virginia, UCLA, and NSF’s NOIRLab, which focuses on nighttime astronomy, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. , made up of many radio telescopes around the US and Chile.
The facility will work to “accelerate the traditionally time-consuming aspects of astronomical research, such as processing and analyzing large amounts of data and creating and evaluating simulations of complex phenomena such as the activity of chemistry in the stars,” according to the release.
The NSF-Simons SkAI Institute, meanwhile, will be led by Northwestern University in collaboration with the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Chicago-based Adler Planetarium.
It will focus on what the release called “uniquely complex problems in astrophysics and astronomy,” including the physics of strange objects (such as black holes and neutron stars), the formation of galaxies, and dark matter activities and dark forces.
In remarks included in the release, NSF Administrator Sethuraman Panchanathan pointed to the large amount of data that will come from major projects such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is a joint effort by the agency and the Department of Energy, to say that information. “is too large and rich to be fully explored with existing methods.”
“With reliable and trustworthy AI in their toolbox, everyone from students to senior researchers will have exciting new ways to find valuable insights that lead to they are amazing discoveries that may remain hidden in the data,” said Panchanathan.
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