The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) will receive continued funding to research and further innovate artificial intelligence (AI) following a recent federal commitment to the university.
The funding comes as part of a recent $100 million public-private investment from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), supporting six institutions that expand AI technologies nationwide.
At UT Austin, the AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), which is hosted on campus, will receive the funding, according to a release on the university’s website. UT Austin’s allocation will support AI research to improve the reliability of AI models and lead to new drug development and improvements in clinical diagnoses.
According to the release, IFML has been at the forefront of generative AI research and has contributed to tools such as OpenCLIP and DataComp, which help improve how AI systems understand images and text together. The NSF has invested a total of $20 million over five years in IFML’s research.
With the renewed funding, IFML seeks to further improve AI systems and address challenges associated with the training and fine-tuning of large models and deep networks. The research teams will work to adapt technologies across domains, such as protein engineering and AI-driven health care.
The funding will also enable IFML to support additional postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, while expanding its workforce development initiatives. These efforts build on UT’s newly launched Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence program to help meet growing demand for a highly skilled AI workforce.
Across the U.S., the NSF has less than 30 National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, two of which, IFML and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, are at UT.
Along with the investment in IFML at UT, the NSF also announced investments in four other research institutes. The AI‑Materials Institute at Cornell University, the Institute for Student AI‑Teaming at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Molecule Maker Lab Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign, the AI Institutes Virtual Organization at the University of California Davis and the AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants at Brown University all received funding as part of $100 million investment by the NSF, in partnership with Capital One and Intel.
The federal investment in UT Austin’s AI research aligns with the White House AI Action Plan and directly supports federal goals such as expanding AI literacy and training access listed in Executive Order 14277.
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