Carnegie Mellon, UC San Diego top US grant winners for AI research
Science|Business ranks recipients of National Science Foundation grants in AI - and finds an Italian at MIT is the biggest winner
By Raffaele Guerini
The US has been leading global development of artificial intelligence – but which universities are biggest in the sciences underlying the field? A Science|Business analysis of grants by the US National Science Foundation ranks Carnegie Mellon, UC San Diego, University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champagne campus, and MIT as its top four AI-related science grant recipients since 2010.
Over the past 14 years, Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University has been awarded $225 million (€209 million) in NSF grants for AI-related research – more than any other American university. Close behind is the University of California San Diego with $219 million, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne at $196 million, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with $183 million.
Taken together, those four universities have won 10.6% of the agency’s $7.7 billion total AI-related science grants. But the funding is more broadly distributed than that might suggest. In all, 93 universities across the US have received AI-related NSF grants exceeding $20 million each, and 145 have received more than $10 million each. That diversity may be part of the reason the US tech industry, which relies on academic breakthroughs for much of its own AI development, has been so strong in the field: today, eight out of the ten largest tech companies in the world by market cap are US-based.
Also important to the US strength, however, is that many of its top researchers are foreign-born – a feature of American science since before the wartime Manhattan Project.
MIT’s Italian grant winner
The single most successful principal investigator, in terms of NSF money received, is European: Tomaso Poggio. He is a computational neuroscientist at MIT, focusing on the mathematics of deep learning and the visual cortex – both areas of fundamental science underpinning today’s AI systems. He was educated in Italy and worked at the Max Planck Society in Germany, before moving to MIT in Cambridge, Mass. His name is on $48.6 million in AI research grants from NSF, and is co-director of MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. Poggio also contributed over the years to the creation of many AI companies, including Google-owned DeepMind...
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