Sept. 19, 2024 — Funded by a five-year, $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is partnering with other academic institutions and federal laboratories in the Midwest to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to advance astrophysics research and exploration of the universe.

Led by Northwestern University, the collaboration will establish the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky or SkAI (pronounced “sky”), one of two AI research centers that will help astronomers better understand the cosmos.

Located close to NCSA’s home in Illinois, SkAI will bring together researchers to create and deploy innovative AI mechanisms that will analyze large datasets from astronomical surveys and transform physics-based simulations in pursuit of furthering deep space exploration. SkAI will unite 83 team members from 25 partner organizations, including NCSA, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Chicago, the Adler Planetarium and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Our mission at the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) in NCSA has been to bring together innovative software and cutting-edge hardware to tackle the most pressing questions in the universe” said SkAI co-principal investigator and CAPS Deputy Director Gautham Narayan. “We’re very excited to have our students, postdocs, faculty and staff deepen our involvement with our colleagues at Northwestern and U of Chicago, provide the entire SkAI community access to NSF’s Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers here at NCSA and build tools and services that lead to AI methods becoming more interpretable and reliable. Our goal is to democratize AI and make it more trustworthy – not just for astrophysics and cosmology, or our campus, but for everyone. This is a big leap forward, and Illinois will lead the way.”

“I am thrilled to receive this opportunity to work with our amazing cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional team, so we can accelerate the data-driven revolution that wide and deep sky surveys will bring to the field of astronomy,” said Northwestern’s Vicky Kalogera, SkAI director and principal investigator of the grant. “We will transform our astrophysical understanding across an enormous range of scales – from stars and the transients they produce to the evolving galaxies they live in, the black holes they form, and to the dark sector of the universe and its cosmological origins.”

Astronomical surveys like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and CMB-Stage 4 experiment promise transformational advances in astrophysics and cosmology. Realizing these breakthroughs will require overcoming enormous challenges in data analysis, modeling and experiment design. Researchers will need assistance provided by these SkAI resources to sufficiently interpret increasingly large and complex datasets.

“The massive amount of data that will be gathered in the coming years by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory and other large-scale astronomical projects is simply too vast and rich to be fully explored with existing methods,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “With reliable and trustworthy AI in their toolbox, everyone from students to senior researchers will have exciting new ways to gain valuable insights leading to amazing discoveries that might otherwise remain hidden in the data.”

SkAI will also be a bastion for open science and emphasize diversity of disciplines and researchers in its work. Building on existing partnerships with urban and rural community colleges, minority serving institutions, youth organizations, the Adler Planetarium, artists and art organizations, and industry professionals, the new institute will develop Astro-AI educational and workforce-development resources for high school students through postdocs. SkAI will engage the public around Astro-AI concepts and enhance local, regional and national research capacity and knowledge transfer to the community, higher-learning institutions and in industry. Activities will be designed to lower barriers to access and grow a more diverse STEM workforce.

“Our research will be guided by AI ethics principles and all SkAI members will be trained in key AI ethics practices,” Narayan said. “Our commitment to open collaboration ensures that SkAI research products are adopted widely. We will develop new, trustworthy AI tools in an open-source ecosystem and train a diverse generation of scientists and engineers to ethically apply and extend AI within academia and beyond.

“University of Illinois leadership and their vision in creating the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys has enabled us to get a head start in these areas, and was crucial to the success of SkAI, and their continuing support gives us the freedom and ability to innovate. By pushing the frontier of computing, we’re reaching ever more distant horizons in the universe.”

For more details on SkAI, check out the announcements from NSF and Northwestern University.

About ASPO/CAPS

NCSA’s Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) brings cohesion and advancement to astrophysical survey science efforts across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. CAPS offers annual postdoctoral and graduate fellowship programs, publishes vast amounts of astronomical data from a broad portfolio of astrophysical surveys and collaborates across disciplines to enable trailblazing research.

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Source: Andrew Helregel, NCSA