National Science Foundation awards UC Davis $5 million for artificial intelligence hub
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 29-Jul-2025 22:11 ET (30-Jul-2025 02:11 GMT/UTC)
The National Science Foundation has awarded $5 million over five years to the University of California, Davis, to run the Artificial Intelligence Institutes Virtual Organization, a community hub for new and existing AI institutes established by the federal government. AIVO is part of a $100 million public-private investment in AI announced by NSF July 29.
A new institute, based at Brown and supported by a $20 million National Science Foundation grant, will convene researchers to guide development of a new generation of AI assistants for use in mental and behavioral health.
Researchers have devised a new machine learning method to improve large-scale climate model projections and demonstrated that the new tool makes the models more accurate at both the global and regional level. This advance should provide policymakers with improved climate projections that can be used to inform policy and planning decisions.
In underwater experiments off Alaska, red sea urchins kept their distance from kelp blades placed near caged sunflower sea stars, suggesting that the mere presence of these predators can protect kelp forests.
Florida’s Avon Park bombing range is teeming with life. Over 40 at-risk species occupy this 106,000-acre expanse used by the U.S. Air Force for training exercises. Conservation biologists from Michigan State University are using the range to test something other than weapons: innovative strategies to save threatened species. Using decades’ worth of monitoring data, researchers are looking back through time to understand the outcome of interventions designed to rescue a population of imperiled red-cockaded woodpeckers. What they’ve found is a promising story of success.
MIT researchers developed a fully autonomous platform that can identify, mix, and characterize novel polymer blends until it finds the optimal blend. This system could streamline the design of new composite materials for sustainable biocatalysis, better batteries, cheaper solar panels, and safer drug-delivery materials.