Overview

Led by The Ohio State University, the U.S. National Science Foundation funded AI institute for Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment (ICICLE) will build the next generation of Cyberinfrastructure to render Artificial Intelligence (AI) more accessible to everyone and drive its further democratization in the larger society.

The widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) fueling advances in science, education, and commerce has been driven not only by the ability to aggregate data from a wide range of sources, but also by the availability of increasingly powerful Cyberinfrastructure (CI) supporting AI advances. As CI becomes more complex and heterogeneous, end users of the technology face a bewildering set of choices in applying AI to leverage insightful analytics, modeling complex systems, or enabling automation.

The following video provides a high-level overview and rationale of the ICICLE project.

Mission Statement

As a national infrastructure that enables artificial intelligence at the flick of a switch, NSF ICICLE will transform today’s AI landscape from a narrow set of privileged disciplines to one where democratized AI empowers domains broadly through integrated plug-and-play AI. Converging under one virtual roof, NSF ICICLE will foster interdisciplinary communities, advance foundational AI and CI, and transform application domains. Through its innovative approach to training and technology transfer, NSF ICICLE will develop an AI-enabled workforce and support innovative companies with a commitment to broad participation and opportunity at all levels. Ultimately, NSF ICICLE will enable a transparent and trustworthy national infrastructure for an AI-enabled future to address pressing societal problems and enable decision-making for national priorities.

Project Components and Stakeholders

The project team recognizes a massive and ever-growing gap between available AI techniques and their availability to end users.

Key Value Propositions of ICICLE

Establish a national Cyberinfrastructure for AI
Develop rubrics for training next generation of researchers who can translate from use cases to AI-powered CI
Integrate emerging AI technologies with advanced CI capabilities
Design a roadmap for future AI-driven science and Cyberinfrastructure
Build a nexus of collaboration among AI, CI, and domain sciences

ICICLE Ethics Statement

Developed by a consortium of researchers, educators, and community leaders from Artificial Intelligence (AI), cyberinfrastructure (CI), and food systems, precision agriculture, and animal ecology domains across fourteen institutions, ICICLE employs an edge-to-center, plug and play model that builds trustworthiness into the system by leveraging domain knowledge to facilitate contextual, sustainable, and democratizing outcomes. Democratizing AI requires both fair access and reliability in practice and research. This is performed at ICICLE’s Institutional Level through .team-wide workforce development training on recognizing influences in decision-making and data models; through the implementation of a project-wide, auditable (transparent and reproducible) workflows; and through the co-design of field edge-to-HPC/Cloud infrastructure. And, it is executed at the AI/System Level through data integrity and privacy preserving practices, and through an ontology-driven system architecture focused on traceable, conversational, and graphical explainability.