The University of Washington and Washington State University are adding artificial intelligence research institutes thanks to $40 million in funding from the National Science Foundation.
UW and WSU will house two of 11 newly created institutes that span seven different areas of AI. Each institute will receive $20 million in funding over five years.
UW’s research lab, the AI Institute for Dynamic Systems, will focus on fundamental AI and machine learning theory. This includes real time learning in situations that are complex and where conditions are hard to predict.
The goal of UW’s institute is to integrate physics-based models with AI and machine learning to create explainable solutions across science and engineering. The research focuses on scenarios that are a combination of many types of physics in dynamic systems, like turbulence or how the body recovers from injury.
Steve Brunton, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering, said the institute will study whether machine learning can be developed while adding both known and unknown laws of physics. Brunton is associate director of the institute.
Also joining the research institute are J. Nathan Kutz as director, Krithika Manohar as lead researcher, along with Maryam Fazel, Daniela Witten and David Beck.
UW is partnering with other regional institutions in this research.
The research lab at WSU will focus on AI in agriculture to address issues in the industry like labor, water, weather and climate change. It will include farmers, workers, managers and policy makers, and offer AI training and education to help increase tech skills of the agricultural workforce.
