In July 2021, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced funding to create eleven new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, building on the first round of seven institutes funded in 2020. It is a combined investment of $220 million.

Led by NSF, and in partnership with the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Homeland Security, Google, Amazon, Intel, and Accenture, the National AI Research Institutes will act as connections in a broader nationwide network to pursue transformational advances in a range of economic sectors, and science and engineering fields — from food system security to next-generation edge networks.

The 2021 awards, each at about $20 million over five years, will support eleven institutes.

ARCS university partner institutions will house some of the new AI institutes, including:

• University of Washington’s research lab, the AI Institute for Dynamic Systems, will focus on fundamental AI and machine learning theory, including real time learning in situations that are complex and where conditions are hard to predict.
• Washington State University’s institute will be known as AgAID. It will incorporate AI methods into agriculture operations to address complex agricultural challenges.
• Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) will lead the Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups, also known as AI-CARING. The institute will seek to create a fully developed discipline focused on personalized, longitudinal (over months and years) collaborative AI systems that learn individual models of human behavior and how they change over time and use that knowledge to better collaborate and communicate in caregiving environments.
• The AI Institute for Advances in Optimization will be led by Georgia Tech. This institute will revolutionize decision-making on a large scale by fusing AI and mathematical optimization into intelligent systems that will achieve breakthroughs that neither field can achieve independently. The institute will create pathways from high school to undergraduate and graduate education and workforce development training for AI in engineering that will empower a generation of underrepresented students and teachers to join the AI revolution.
• The AI Institute for Learning-Enabled Optimization at Scale will be led by University of California San Diego, in collaboration with five other universities across the nation. This institute will aim to “make impossible optimizations possible” by addressing the fundamental challenges of scale and complexity.