NSF Prepares To Announce Artificial Intelligence Coordination Hubs

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This fall, U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) officials expect to announce the first round of coordination hubs designed ultimately to provide access to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for all Americans and prepare the country for a national and global economy heavily dependent on those technologies.

The NSF announced the AI-Ready America program in March to “expand access to AI knowledge, tools, training and capacity building so all Americans can participate in—and benefit from—the AI economy.” The NSF leads the program and is partnering with other departments and agencies, including the Labor Department, Agriculture Department and Small Business Administration. It also has backing from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“Informed by the White House AI Action Plan, the NSF AI-Ready America initiative is designed to close the gap between the nation’s AI capabilities and the workforce, businesses, and communities that need to use them,” the NSF announcement explains. “The initiative targets three areas where that gap is widest: expanding AI literacy and applied skills across the American workforce; equipping small businesses and local governments with the tools and technical assistance to adopt AI; and building hands-on learning pathways—including internships and project-based programs—that translate AI skills into real-world application. 

Proposals to serve as coordination hubs are due July 16.

The initiative is built around three core activities: state and territory-level coordination hubs, a national coordination lead and AI-Ready Catalyst Award competitions. NSF officials hoped to “put out a funding opportunity” for the national coordination lead in May and intend to announce the first round of coordination hubs sometime this fall, according to Erwin Gianchandani, the NSF’s assistant director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. “We’re hoping to be able to announce the first set of coordination hubs, maybe a dozen or so, something like that, later this fall, and we hope to be able to support the remainder over the course of the next couple of years,” Gianchandani reported during a SIGNAL Media interview.

The hubs will be coordinated networks in each state and territory and the District of Columbia that will “connect partners across education, workforce development, industry and government; strengthen planning and deployment; and rapidly scale proven approaches,” according to an NSF website. Using coordination hubs allows state and local agencies to choose what to prioritize in shaping an AI-driven economy that benefits all Americans. The hubs will be expected to provide tools to navigate AI learning opportunities and resources, facilitate hands-on implementation support, coordinate training and capacity building, and support state or territory strategic planning. The NSF anticipates that each coordination hub awardee will receive $1 million per year for three years, with the possibility of an additional year of support if the hub demonstrates a compelling need as it phases out or transitions to other sources of funding. An initial round of funding will support 10 states, with expansion to all states and territories in subsequent rounds. 

The NSF has a long history of working with colleges and universities but didn’t want to narrowly define what kind of institution could serve as a coordination hub. The NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide suggests that institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations, for-profit businesses, including small businesses, state, territorial and local governments, tribal nations and organizations, Federally Funded Research Centers and consortia led by an eligible organization may all be eligible. 

“We say in our funding opportunities—at least for the one that we’ve announced around the coordination hubs at the state and territorial levels—that you are eligible to submit if you’re any one of a number of entities,” Gianchandani said. “We want to be open-ended and see the great proposals and submissions that we get, and from whom, and then we can go from there.”

Coordination hubs will be selected using a comprehensive set of criteria spelled out in the funding opportunity documentation. The criteria include a clear vision and approach for advancing statewide or territory-wide AI readiness in alignment with the program goals; clear and demonstrable evidence of bringing together different stakeholders within the state or territory; a demonstrated understanding of current state/territory efforts in AI and related areas; and a gap analysis to understand where the gaps are and how the coordination hub can actively accelerate progress. 

“There are gaps in our efforts right now. So how does [a proposal] fulfill those gaps? We’re going to also be looking at the milestones, the measurable outcomes, evidence-based questions and implementation details that the team offers around what it is that they’re claiming they’re going to be able to do over the course of the next one, two, three, four years,” Gianchandani said. 

He added that since AI is here to stay, proposers should demonstrate they can come up with a long-term plan indicating they can mobilize additional resources to expand their impact beyond the funding the NSF is providing and how they will leverage those resources going forward.

The second major element of the program, the national coordination lead, needs to be an organization with personnel already in place. “We imagine that the national coordination hub would be an organization with some staffing associated with it that would help facilitate all of the conversations that need to take place around coordination. We do want the conversations to be spurred at the state and local level [and] connect the organizations and efforts within a state or territory. But then how do we ensure some consistency and coherency across the board? It’s our hope that you have an entity of some kind with some staffing that’s helping us stitch together that national fabric,” Gianchandani offered.

The AI-Ready Catalyst Award competitions are the third major piece of the program. “The idea there is a series of topic-driven competitions that we issue over the course of the program to really pilot and scale innovative approaches that address critical national AI readiness needs,” Gianchandani said. Depending on where I am, depending on what my technological needs are, what my local-level challenges are, maybe I want to specifically pilot and scale an innovative approach in the context of agriculture or in the context of transportation and logistics and so forth.” 

AI-Ready America is not the only government program designed to help prepare workers for the ongoing AI revolution. The Labor Department, for example, initiated the similarly named Make America AI Ready initiative. It offers a free, one-week AI literacy course for every American worker delivered entirely by text message to users’ cellphones. With 10-minute per day sessions, it is intended to help Americans understand AI principles, explore the technology’s uses, effectively use AI, evaluate its results and use it responsibly.

“There is no one solution to being able to get every American trained up on AI,” Gianchandani noted. 

“There are other efforts even out of this very agency, the National Science Foundation, out of Department of Labor, and so forth, announced by this administration over the last 14, 15, 16 months, that are trying to support this rubric around how we get the workforce trained up and really enable every American to be able to, at the end of the day, participate in and benefit from the AI economy.”