The National Science Foundation has awarded a multi-institutional team led by Northwestern University a $9 million grant to launch the Sage project, a novel cyberinfrastructure created to exploit dramatic improvements in artificial intelligence technology. The end goal is to build a continent-spanning network of smart sensors that will allow scientists to analyze and respond to data almost instantly.
George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government Professor of Neuroscience James Olds joins a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-San Diego that will design and build reusable software components and cyberinfrastructure services to support the new scientific measurement functions. Those range from in-situ analysis of high-bandwidth sensor data streams to adaptive system behaviors, such as adjusting the sampling rates and directional settings of LIDAR instruments or high-resolution cameras in order to capture events in more detail.
“This is important because it allows scientists to reconfigure arrays of sensors ‘on the fly’ when something important happens, like a wildfire in Sonoma County or a Derecho moving through Ohio,” said Olds, former head of Biological Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation.
The new distributed infrastructure will allow scientists to analyze and respond to data almost instantly. From the early detection of wildfire smoke plumes to identifying the ultrasonic calls of bats to the patterns of pedestrians in a busy crosswalk, the artificial intelligence-enabled sensors within Sage will give scientists a new tool for understanding our planet.
“We’ll know when it’s successful when NSF’s largest instruments can adapt in real-time to interesting events ranging from those in the cosmos to those in our urban centers,” said Olds.