UH Hilo Joins $152M National AI Project to Advance Scientific Discovery

Prof. Travis Mandel, PhD “Having UH Hilo involved is going to raise the AI profile of UH Hilo, and it’s going to definitely enhance our programs in Data Science, especially, but also Computer Science, to help us offer more of this cutting edge work in AI to our students,” said Travis Mandel, PhD, associate professor of Computer Science and coordinator of UH Hilo’s Data Science Program.

Mandel serves as co-principal investigator on the project and will co-lead adaptation and community engagement efforts to ensure the AI models meet the needs of diverse scientific communities, including researchers across Hawaiʻi.

“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,” explained Mandel.

The AI system will be fully open — a rare feature in the field — allowing UH Hilo students and faculty to not only use but also explore and modify how the models are trained. This transparency will help demystify AI and give students direct experience with high-performance systems often inaccessible to smaller institutions.

Chancellor Bonnie D. Irwin “We are honored to work alongside Ai2 and the other university partners on this groundbreaking initiative,” said 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.”

The project will integrate state-of-the-art AI infrastructure into UH Hilo’s academic programs, creating summer internship opportunities, school-year internships, and collaborations with leading AI experts. Students will work side-by-side with faculty and scientists applying AI to local and global challenges in fields such as astronomy, marine science, and climate research.

Mandel also plans to embed project-driven assignments into his courses, ensuring students work on real, cutting edge problems rather than theory alone.

“One thing that society in general is struggling with right now, is everybody’s starting 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, right? And so to train more students, to provide more access to the world in general, to understand what goes into these systems and how they're built — I think that’s really a huge contribution that we’re making,” Mandel explained.