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UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s assistant professor of computer science, Aditya Grover, has received a National Science Foundation, NSF CAREER Award to support his research designing artificial intelligence models that can expedite the pace of scientific discovery to help address urgent sustainability challenges, such as climate and energy. This is Grover’s fourth early-career award in the past two years.
This NSF award is the highest honor for faculty members in the early stages of their careers. The five-year, $500,000 grant will fund Grover’s research on developing generative AI models — artificial intelligence deep-learning models that build new data based on the datasets used to train them — specifically for scientific work.
Grover’s research focuses on probabilistic machine learning — a subfield of AI which uses a statistics- and probability-based approach to make predictions. At UCLA, he leads the Machine Intelligence (MINT) group, which develops AI systems that can interact, reason and make sequential decisions with limited supervision.
Grover’s research will also explore how such generative AI applications can then help build computer simulations, forecasting techniques and experimental designs, with a particular emphasis on applying machine learning to the field of climate science and sustainable energy.
Grover’s team work on ClimaX, a generalizable deep learning model which demonstrated superior performance in weather-forecasting and climate-projection benchmarks, was published in 2023.
In March, Grover was named a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow. The two-year fellowship program provides a grant up to $300,000 for interdisciplinary AI research with the goal of establishing AI systems aligned with human values by 2050. Grover was also recognized in Forbes’ 2024 30 Under 30 list in science and as a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Science in 2023.
