As artificial intelligence continues to grow rapidly, so does the research behind it at the University of New Mexico. Sarah Dreyer, an assistant professor of political science, was awarded one of several experts across the country and was selected to tackle a large grant-funded project on AI.
National Science Foundation (NSF) and Nvidia awarded the total $152 million for Allen Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI2) over the next five years. The funding also includes four academic institutions: the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of New Mexico.
Many generative AI tools that interact with users are unique and lack transparency, and do not let individuals know how these models are trained or how their data will be utilized. The grant will help AI2 and its partner universities develop a fully open AI ecosystem and infrastructure at the national level, designed to promote scientific discovery through artificial intelligence. In doing so, it will also contribute to advances in the science of AI itself. The goal is to make these tools more open, transparent and reliable. The initiative is based on an existing family of AI (AI2) high-performance open text models and its open, industry-leading multimodal language model.
Photo: Assistant Professor Sarah Dreyer
As a Co-PI, Professor Dreyer Co-lead part of the initiative's data curation. Building a multimodal language model begins with building a large collection of unpublished data, including text and data from other modalities such as images and code. “My role is based on my own academic research, which evaluates how LLM handles unique and singular texts generated by politicians and policy makers.” Dreyer said.
Professor Drayer Will Also It plays an important role in training a diverse workforce. Include hosting Educational sessions to show how UNM Researcher can use Infrastructure to enhance their research. These sessions will gather infrastructure feedback that supports UNM research and provide the opportunity to brainstorm new applications.
“My hope is that access to this cutting-edge infrastructure, training and computing power will help train and empower our faculty and students and promote economic innovation in New Mexico,” she said.
Regarding the team funded by this new initiative, Drayer said. “I morning I am honored to have one work I respect along with the researchers and I hope for this process can Jump start wave of Scientific advances in our state and beyond.“
