To Speed Up Scientific Discoveries, The U.S. Department of Energy Plans to Promote AI

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A major initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up scientific discoveries planned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Last week, DOE officials said  “They will likely ask Congress for between $3 billion and $4 billion over 10 years, roughly the amount the agency is spending to build next-generation “exascale” supercomputers.”

CEO of Hyperion Research Earl Joseph said “That’s a good starting point.” Hyperion Research is a high-performance computing analysis firm in St. Paul that tracks AI research funding. He added, that DOE’s planned spending is modest compared with the feverish investment in AI by China and industry.

Chris Fall, who directs DOE’s Office of Science says, “We generate almost unimaginable amounts of data, petabytes per day,” as DOE has a big asset: torrents of data. DOE funds atom surveys of the universe, the sequencing of thousands of genomes and smashers. He stated at the last of four town halls DOE has held to build support for the AI initiative. Algorithms trained with these data could help discover new materials or spot signs of new physics. “It’s going to impact everything we do,” Fall says.

Worldwide corporate AI funding is expected to hit $35.8 billion this year which is up 44% from 2018 , and DOE is joining a global rush to fund AI. Companies realizing commercial advantages in AI.

Governments are also promoting it, President Donald Trump in February, signed an executive order launching the American AI Initiative. According to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, the administration requested nearly $1 billion for AI and machine learning research in fiscal year 2020 across all civilian agencies. The U.S. Department of Defense is looking for a similar level of funding for unclassified military AI programs.

Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment, and life sciences at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, says “Though DOE has yet to detail its program, it’s likely to include funding for national labs to optimize existing supercomputers for AI, and external funding for academic research into AI computer architectures.” Whereas DOE officials say the AI initiative will help keep U.S. researchers at the forefront.

Source: sciencemag.org