Aditya Grover wins $500,000 NSF Career Award for generative AI research

Indian American scholar Aditya Grover has received a National Science Foundation Career Award for his research designing artificial intelligence models to expedite scientific discovery to help address urgent sustainability challenges, such as climate and energy.

The award to Grover, an Indian assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, is the agency’s highest honor for faculty members in the early stages of their careers.

The five-year, $500,000 grant will fund Grover’s research on developing generative AI models — artificial intelligence deep-learning models that build new data based on the datasets used to train them — specifically for scientific work. Ultimately, the models will be ultra reliable, broadly applicable and function with minimal human supervision.

A key for this project will be creating AI models that incorporate large but disparate datasets. Grover’s research will also explore how such generative AI applications can then help build computer simulations, forecasting techniques and experimental designs.

READ: Ramayya Krishnan to lead new AI cooperative research center at Carnegie Mellon (October 9, 2024)

Grover’s research focuses on probabilistic machine learning — a subfield of AI which uses a statistics- and probability-based approach to make predictions.

At UCLA, he leads the Machine Intelligence (MINT) group, which develops AI systems that can interact, reason and make sequential decisions with limited supervision.

The research group puts particular emphasis on applying machine learning to the field of climate science and sustainable energy. In 2023, the MINT group published his team’s work on ClimaX, a generalizable deep learning model which demonstrated superior performance in weather-forecasting and climate-projection benchmarks.

This is Grover’s fourth early-career award in the past two years. In March, Grover was named a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow. The two-year fellowship program provides a grant up to $300,000 for interdisciplinary AI research with the goal of establishing AI systems aligned with human values by 2050.

Grover was also recognized in Forbes’ 2024 30 Under 30 list in science and as a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Science in 2023. Since joining the UCLA faculty, he has also received an Amazon Research Award, an AI Researcher of the Year Award from Samsung, a Google Award for Inclusion Research and a Meta Research Award.

(This post was originally published by the American Bazaar.)