NSF awards $20M for researchers to deploy AI to tackle large optimization issues
July 29, 2021 by Keith McAleer
The Nationwide Science Foundation has awarded $20 million in excess of 5 a long time to the Ga Institute of Engineering, the University of California, Berkeley and the College of Southern California to create the Nationwide Synthetic Intelligence (AI) Institute for Advancements in Optimization. The award is between 11 new Countrywide AI Analysis Institutes declared nowadays by NSF.
The AI Institute for Innovations in Optimization aims to deliver a paradigm shift in automatic determination-creating at large scales by fusing AI and mathematical optimization, to achieve breakthroughs that neither discipline can realize independently.
“The frequent electricity outages in reaction to wildfires in the Western United States highlighted the great importance of resilient distribution of energy,” claimed Alper Atamturk, the UC Berkeley direct for the new institute and chair of the Office of Industrial Engineering and Functions Exploration (IEOR). “We also saw the problems in supply chains early in the pandemic when PPEs and health-related equipment could not be sent to hospitals. By unifying information-driven and product-driven ways at the main of AI and functions investigate, the institute will assist deliver the next technology of management and optimization algorithms for functioning energy grids with dispersed renewable era, and for planning and operating effective and resilient source chains.”
Pascal Van Hentenryck, professor and affiliate chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Ga Tech’s College of Industrial and Methods Engineering, is the guide principal investigator of the AI institute. The institute features 10 UC Berkeley school members, which include co-principal investigator Dorit Hochbaum, professor in the IEOR division.
“UC Berkeley is a leader in AI, machine studying and optimization,” explained Atamturk. “We are delighted to sign up for forces with interdisciplinary investigate groups at Ga Tech and USC to advance AI and optimization systems to handle grand challenges in really constrained options these types of as logistics and provide chains, vitality and sustainability, and circuit style and design and management.”
To completely transform conclusion-generating at large scales, the institute will build strategies that not only forecast and quantify uncertainty, but also continually study and explanation to develop the greatest alternatives for the difficulties at hand. The AI institute’s methodology thrusts involve a new era of algorithms that use end-to-conclude discovering to tightly combine forecasting and decision-building, and novel equipment-studying solutions that can tackle large combos of things and constraints.
A crucial element of the Institute is a partnership with historically Black faculties and universities (HBCUs) in Ga and Hispanic-serving local community faculties in California to make longitudinal education and workforce development plans. The institute will help the progress of new AI education and research applications in these faculties and universities, addressing the widening hole in occupation alternatives in technologies fields.
The other UC Berkeley school associates in the institute are professors Pieter Abbeel in electrical engineering and computer system sciences (EECS) and IEOR, Laurent El Ghaoui in EECS and IEOR, Paul Grigas in IEOR, Borivoje Nikolic in EECS, Barna Saha in IEOR, Max Shen in IEOR, Raluca Scarlat in nuclear engineering, and Vladimir Stojanovic in EECS.
In addition to Ga Tech and USC, the institute delivers together companions from Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College and the University of Texas at Arlington.
To study far more about the AI Institute for Developments in Optimization, pay a visit to AI4Choose.org.