Congratulations to Hunter CSCI's Professor Sarah Ita Levitan, who will be senior personnel for the soon-to-be-established AI Institute for ARtificial and Natural Intelligence (ARNI). The National Science Foundation (NSF), in conjunction with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, has just announced $20 million in 5-year grant funding to establish the ARNI. The institute aims to "draw together top researchers across the country to focus on a national priority: connecting the major progress made in artificial intelligence (AI) systems to the revolution in our understanding of the brain."

The ARNI will convene research partners from a panoply of universities, including CUNY; industry partners like Amazon, DeepMind, Google, IBM, and Meta; and outreach partners like the Neuromatch Academy and the New York Hall of Science. Drawing from this deep well of expertise, the institute seeks to address "the urgent need for new paradigms of interdisciplinary research between neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI." It will be led by several distinguished Principal Investigators, whose expertise spans artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, statistics, neuroscience, physics and cognitive science.

For a more detailed announcement from Columbia University - the ARNI's lead university partner - please see this link. We're so excited that Sarah Ita will be senior personnel on this groundbreaking project!