Team led by INFORMS members receives $20M NSF grant for AI research

A team led by INFORMS member Pascal Van Hentenryck is getting some major help with their research.

The National Science Foundation has awarded the team a five-year, $20 million grant to fund the NSF Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT) to study AI and mathematical optimization in automated decision-making.

Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and professor at Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). Many of the collaborators on the project are also INFORMS members, including George Lan, also at ISyE; professors Alper Atamturk and Dorit Hochbaum at the University of Califoria, Berkeley; Bistra Dilkina, associate professor at University of Southern California; and professor Charles Pierre at Clark Atlanta University. The interinstitutional team includes other researchers and faculty from Georgia Tech, as well as the University of Texas at Arlington and Spelman College.

According to Van Hentenryck, another significant goal of the AI Institute is to democratize access to AI education, research and jobs for underrepresented groups.

Van Hentenryck brings experience to this task through his design and delivery of the Seth Bonder Camp in Computational and Data Science for Engineering, an online course and on-campus summer camp designed to increase awareness of the fields of data science and operations research among high school students, which is also a 2020 DEI Ambassador project led by Van Hentenryck to deploy the camp in minority high schools. (For the project’s executive summary, click here.)

To learn more about AI4OPT, visit www.ai4opt.org. For more about the team and the project, click here.