Conference: SAIL 2025: Summit for AI Institutes Leadership, Reston VA October 21-23, 2025

This conference is the fourth annual program-wide meeting in the National AI Research Institutes Program. The Summit for AI Institutes Leadership (SAIL 2025) is an NSF-sponsored conference organized and executed by the program’s hub activity, the AI Institutes Virtual Organization (AIVO). The conference gathers the leaders and other key personnel from all AI Institutes to foster community building of those Institutes and other related activities into a network of collaborating organizations conducting knowledge exchange, growing their own competencies, and engaging with the broader public. The conference will take place October 21-23, 2025, in Reston, VA.

This conference aims to maximize the value of the AI Institutes as a flagship national AI investment. The conference delivers on the intent of NSF and its funding partners to continue to nurture the AI Institutes into a fully cohered national program, resulting in synergy across the constituent institutes that is greater than the sum of its parts. This gathering builds upon the successes and lessons from the previous SAIL events (2022 through 2024) and continues a successful record of establishing SAIL as the cornerstone event for the National AI Research Institutes program.

The conference program addresses the needs of AI Institutes in various stages of their lifecycle, from those in their fifth year to newly established AI Institutes. This greatly enhances knowledge transfer among all. The program includes knowledge exchange about education and outreach, project management, computing and research infrastructure, communications, workforce development, and ethics.

The conference is comprised of a balance of community-moderated panels with plenary sessions and other program-wide community building. A day of workshops prior to the main conference allows the program’s special interest groups to hold smaller community workshops around topics of interest withing a specialized area, and across institute boundaries.

The plan also calls for an embedded activity for Institutes to showcase their technical accomplishments to one another and to a broader audience of potential partners from the broader community of public and private sectors, followed by the opportunity for prospective partners to network at the event toward greater understanding of funded research in AI and the potential initiation of new collaborations.

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.