UH Hilo awarded $1.4M to collaborate on groundbreaking nationwide AI initiative

Posted on August 14, 2025January 10, 2026 by Staff

The government-private industry funding will enable UH Hilo students to benefit from the expertise of leading AI researchers while supporting local scientists across Hawaiʻi who wish to incorporate AI into their research.

By Susan Enright/UH Hilo Stories.

The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo will receive over $1.4 million as part of a landmark jointly-funded project between the federal government and a leading private technology company.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and NVIDIA named the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) as the lead organization of the initiative with $75 million from NSF and $77 million from NVIDIA. The overall goal of the initiative is to develop the first fully open suite of advanced AI models explicitly designed to fuel U.S. scientific innovation. UH Hilo will serve as a key collaborating institution.

Travis Mandel business portrait in outdoor setting. — Travis Mandel

Bonnie Irwin business portrait in outside setting. — Bonnie D. Irwin

“We are honored to work alongside Ai2 and the other partners on this groundbreaking initiative,” says UH Hilo Chancellor Bonnie D. Irwin. “This award reflects our university’s growing strength in data science education and our commitment to advancing Hawaiʻi’s role in the nation’s technological future.”

Travis Mandel, an associate professor of computer science and coordinator of the data science program at UH Hilo, serves as co-principal investigator on the project, co-leading the adaptation and community engagement components. The goal is to create fully open, multimodal large language models (LLM, which are complex mathematical models of language built from extensive data) trained on scientific data and literature.

“The aim here is to make AI, the field of AI, more open and transparent to help people be able to see inside [the workings of AI], that’s the thing that society is struggling with right now,” says Mandel. “Everybody is struggling to use AI to help them in various ways with assignments, with projects, with work, but there’s so few people that actually understand what goes on under the hood of that AI.”

Training students, helping the world

Mandel says that the training of more students, and for the world in general to understand what goes into AI systems and how they are built, is the huge contribution that UH Hilo will be making with this funding.

“This award presents an incredible opportunity to bring world-class AI expertise to UH Hilo and help our students better understand the technical details of how these large AI systems work,” says Mandel. “Our data science students will gain invaluable hands-on experience with these systems, whether it be studying how well the AI meets the needs of local scientists, or implementing improved training methods to provide better and more reliable assistance with challenging scientific tasks.”

The new initiative dovetails perfectly with UH Hilo’s data science bachelor’s program, housed in the Department of Computer Science and launched in fall of 2024, the first data science major in the 10-campus UH System. The interdisciplinary program teaches students to collect, process, analyze, and visualize data across four specialized tracks: business, astronomy, computational, and statistical. Students gain hands-on experience with artificial intelligence, machine learning, programming in R and Python, and real-world data analysis projects that prepare them for high-demand careers in the rapidly growing field of data science.

Classroom with two students giving a powerpoint presentation at the front of the class. — Data science students Marianne Martinez and Sebastian Carter present their summer artificial intelligence research project, “Increasing the Effectiveness of AI Assistance,” at an open event held on campus at Mookini Library, August 1, 2025. The summer internship program was led by Associate Professor of Computer Science Travis Mandel. (Photo courtesy of the Data Science Program/UH Hilo)

The funding also will support other UH Hilo academic programs as well as Hawaiʻi scientists who wish to incorporate AI into their environmental, marine, and climate research

Reaching out beyond the data science program, the new $1.4 million initiative will also directly integrate cutting-edge AI infrastructure into other UH Hilo’s academic programs, providing students unprecedented opportunities to contribute to fully open, ethical, and nationally significant AI systems. Students will work alongside Mandel and other AI researchers through summer internships and year-round projects, gaining valuable real-world experience building and evaluating AI models that could transform scientific discovery across multiple disciplines.

The collaboration will enable UH Hilo students to benefit from the expertise of leading AI researchers while supporting local scientists across Hawaiʻi who wish to incorporate AI into their environmental, marine, and climate research.

“If Hawaiʻi wants to be involved in this AI revolution, we need to be able to evaluate how well these systems are helping with problems that we care about here,” says Mandel.

For more information about the initiative, see NSF and NVIDIA media release.