Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is committed to the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in applying the AI methodologies to advance science. Specifically NASA SMD’s commitment includes:

• Applying AI for scientific discovery and societal benefit
• Advancing AI research and application by easing the barrier to entry for using NASA science data and computational resources
• Augmenting processes for efficiently managing large volumes of science data and enhancing user experience using AI technologies
• Fostering cross domain collaboration in reusing AI methodologies

The building blocks for widespread adoption of AI include open data, open-source software, community building, research in advanced algorithm development, and benchmark-labeled datasets. Towards that end, NASA’s Open-Source Science Initiative (OSSI) has invested in a number of activities. These include: understanding the challenges and opportunities, prototyping cross-domain AI use cases, and developing community perspectives on AI for NASA science.

NASA SMD Strategic Data Management Working Group (SDMWG) Artificial Intelligence (AI) team collaborated with the Frontier Development Lab (FDL) to host a virtual SMD AI workshop from May 12-14, 2021. The findings from this workshop were published in the NASA SMD AI Workshop Report. The goals of the workshop were to explore ways to transform science data into AI ready data, examine opportunities to utilize computational platforms for AI, foster applications of AI across multiple science domains, and develop next steps to realize the opportunities.