NSF Student Travel Grant for 2022 UChicago AI+Science Summer School (UChicago AI+Sci SS)

The University of Chicago Data Science Institute’s AI+Science initiative, in partnership with the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI), the James Franck Institute (JFI) at the University of Chicago, and the Institute for Foundations of Data Science (IFDS), will launch its inaugural AI+Science Summer School in August 2022. The goal of the AI+Science Summer School is to introduce a new generation of diverse, interdisciplinary graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and researchers to the emerging field of AI+Science.

The AI+Science Summer School will help build community and spur new research directions focused on AI-enabled scientific discovery across the physical and biological sciences. The program features lectures, panels, hands-on coding sessions, and poster sessions. The featured workshop speakers include cutting-edge researchers both from UChicago and other institutions who are engaging in rigorous work at the intersection of AI and the natural sciences in a range of domains.

The AI+Science Summer School will serve as one of the inaugural activities under the UChicago Data Science Institute to establish and build the AI+Science community, both on the UChicago campus and beyond. Travel scholarships for participating students lower the barrier for participation to students who might not otherwise be able to attend, and serve the mission stated above by including as many capable and qualified participants as possible in this effort to advance the field of AI+Science while simultaneously building community and providing opportunity.

The goal of the AI+Science Summer School is to introduce a new generation of diverse, interdisciplinary graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and researchers to the emerging field of AI+Science. The topics covered in the Summer School will focus on four core themes at the heart of this emerging paradigm of scientific discovery: AI uncovering new laws of nature; AI guiding scientific measurement; physics-informed machine learning; and scientific discovery advancing AI frontiers.

The AI+Science Summer School will help build community and spur new research directions focused on AI-enabled scientific discovery across the physical and biological sciences. Topics of the summer school will include: physics-informed and -constrained neural networks; AI for geosciences and climate modeling; AI-guided search in chemistry and molecular biology; tensor networks for classical and quantum systems; active learning and AI-guided experimental design.

Travel grants will be awarded to 10-15 participating students in the AI+Science Summer School. The participants who are awarded travel scholarships will be at least 50% women, other underrepresented minorities, and first generation college students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.