Brown to Bring Expertise to AI Materials Institute
NSF Awards $20M to Multi-Institutional Project
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with Intel, will invest $20 million over five years to establish the Artificial Intelligence Materials Institute (NSF AI-MI), a collaboration among researchers at Boston University, Cornell University and the City University of New York. The NSF AI-MI will accelerate and transform the discovery of new materials to be used in sustainable energy, advanced electronics, environmental stewardship, and quantum technologies by integrating human scientific expertise with AI methods.
Professor Keith Brown (ME, MSE, Physics) will lead BU’s involvement in the institute. Brown is perhaps best known for his Bayesian experimental autonomous researcher (BEAR) system, a self-driving lab that combines machine learning, robotics, additive manufacturing, and mechanical testing. With the aid of this autonomous system, Brown and colleagues were able to discover the most efficient energy-absorbing material ever, with potential applications in helmet padding and packaging for sensitive equipment. The lab has also developed a “nano BEAR” autonomous research robot to study the way materials behave at the molecular scale.
“My group will be using self-driving labs to conduct materials experiments with the dual goals of evaluating learning models and rapidly providing new data to train advanced models for materials discovery,” says Brown of the new collaboration. “It is an honor to work with such a great team with the goal of revolutionizing the speed of materials research using the power of AI.”
Brown is one of the pioneers in the movement toward targeted design of new materials. The goal of NSF AI-MI is to harness AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data generated during materials research, using it to develop new materials based on prediction.
“We have reached a key moment in the development of artificial intelligence and materials research when the integration of the two fields will lead to powerful new mechanisms for discovery and development,” says Kavita Bala, provost at Cornell, where the institute will be based.
AI-MI plans to create the AI Materials Science Ecosystem (AIMS-EC), an open, cloud-based portal that couples a science-ready large language model (LLM) with targeted data streams, including experimental measurements, simulations, images and scientific papers.
Learn more at the Cornell Chronicle.