ISU to lead research projects through Department of Energy initiative

Iowa State University researchers are contributing to a new, national consortium with their efforts to integrate artificial intelligence with different areas of study and development.

The Ames university announced in a news release that ISU will lead four projects and collaborate on four more for the Genesis Mission, an initiative created by the U.S. Department of Energy to use AI and accelerate research and innovation in areas like advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, nuclear energy and semiconductors.

The Department of Energy announced the awards Wednesday, according to the release. Department of Energy national laboratories, including the Ames National Laboratory, are also partners in the initiative, including corporations like Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Google Public Sector, IBM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir and more.

“As an institution, we’re honored and excited to support the Department of Energy in its historic Genesis Mission,” said ISU Vice President for Research Peter Dorhout in the release. “The innovations our faculty are spearheading show how intelligent, data-rich tools can open new frontiers and accelerate discovery that delivers profound economic impact to our constituents and stakeholders throughout Iowa and around the nation.”

The four ISU-led projects span translational AI, statistics, agronomy and mechanical engineering within the university, and each project includes partners from other national labs. ISU’s Translational AI Center is leading a project to develop “decentralized, cooperating AI agents that share compact insights to generate stronger hypotheses.” The department of mechanical engineering will head the creation of an AI platform to model production system conditions to help successes found in labs to achieve large-scale production.

Statistics and computer science experts at ISU will work to build AI tools for predicting cloud behaviors with the goal of developing “an easy-to-use and real-time AI retrieval framework to enable atmospheric and energy science discovery,” the release stated.

ISU faculty are also working on projects led by the University of Kentucky, Battelle Memorial Institute-Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Auburn University. Computer engineering will also combine with mechanical engineering, translational AI and agronomy for a project aimed at developing an AI framework for linking plant genetics to performance and predicting biological traits.

According to a news release from the Department of Energy, the Genesis Mission announced a total of 278 awards that include 342 partner organizations and institutions, selected from “the largest response to a funding opportunity in DOE history.” The Genesis Mission initiative is “designed to double America’s scientific productivity,” the release stated.

“The extraordinary response to this Genesis Mission application process demonstrates that America’s scientific community is ready to reimagine how discovery happens,” said Under Secretary for Science Dr. Darío Gil in the Department of Energy news release. “Through the Genesis Mission, we are bringing together the nation’s leading researchers, institutions, and technology partners to build the next generation of scientific capability. We look forward to seeing these teams demonstrate new research workflows that accelerate discovery and reveal what is possible when AI and science advance together.”