Open Compass: Leveraging the Compass AI Engineering Testbed to Accelerate Open Research

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has immense potential to contribute to advances spanning progress in science, the national health, prosperity and welfare, education, benefit society, or secure the nation's defense. Research initiatives, conferences, investments, and products based on AI abound and are expanding rapidly, while the methods, performance, and understanding of AI are in their infancy. Researchers face vexing issues such as how to improve performance, transferability, reliability, comprehensibility, and how better to train AI models with only limited data. Future progress depends on advances in hardware accelerators, software frameworks, system architectures, and creating cross-cutting expertise between scientific and AI domains. One way to accelerate progress on these topics is to create an engineering testbed, which provides a controlled environment that allows investigators to explore solutions to these - and other - challenges. Open Compass is an exploratory research project to conduct academic pilot projects on an advanced engineering testbed for artificial intelligence, culminating in the development and publication of best practices. Open Compass will: 1) engage pilot projects and research groups, documenting approaches, experiences, and lessons learned; 2) conduct training events, in-person and using the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's wide area classroom; 3) organize and conduct a workshop focusing on advanced AI technologies; 4) integrate experiences gained through open research collaboration with those of industry experiences to identify a comprehensive set of best practices; and 5) publish results and best practices in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and technical reports. The broad community will benefit from publication of research results, experiences, and a knowledge base of best practices. The research community will gain access to new technologies on which to develop algorithms and applications, along with insight across new fields of those technologies' applicability and important trends for AI. Open Compass will promote workforce development through student involvement in pilot projects and training and provide feedback to industry for to enable more efficient future AI technologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.