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

人工智能（AI）具有巨大的潜力，可以促进科学进步，国家健康，繁荣和福利，教育，造福社会或确保国家的国防。基于人工智能的研究计划、会议、投资和产品比比皆是，并且正在迅速扩大，而人工智能的方法、性能和理解还处于起步阶段。研究人员面临着一些棘手的问题，例如如何提高性能、可移植性、可靠性、可理解性，以及如何更好地用有限的数据训练AI模型。未来的进展取决于硬件加速器、软件框架、系统架构的进步，以及在科学和人工智能领域之间创建交叉专业知识。加快这些主题进展的一种方法是创建一个工程测试平台，它提供了一个受控的环境，使研究人员能够探索这些和其他挑战的解决方案。 Open Compass是一个探索性的研究项目，在人工智能的先进工程试验平台上进行学术试点项目，最终开发和出版最佳实践。Open Compass将：1）参与试点项目和研究小组，记录方法，经验和教训; 2）亲自举办培训活动，并使用匹兹堡超级计算中心的广域教室; 3）组织和举办专注于先进人工智能技术的研讨会; 4）将通过开放研究合作获得的经验与行业经验相结合，以确定一套全面的最佳实践; 5）在同行评审的期刊、会议和技术报告中发表结果和最佳实践。广泛的社区将受益于研究成果、经验和最佳做法知识库的出版。研究界将获得开发算法和应用程序的新技术，沿着深入了解这些技术的适用性和人工智能的重要趋势的新领域。Open Compass将通过学生参与试点项目和培训来促进劳动力发展，并为行业提供反馈，以实现更高效的未来人工智能技术。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.