Political Science Assistant Professor Sarah Dreier from The University of New Mexico has been selected to participate in a major grant-funded project focused on Artificial Intelligence research. Dreier joins a team of experts nationwide as part of an initiative supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NVIDIA, which have awarded $152 million over five years to the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2). Four academic institutions, including UNM, will serve as sub-awardees.
The project aims to address concerns about transparency in generative AI tools, many of which are proprietary and do not reveal how their models are trained or how user data is used. The grant will enable Ai2 and its partner universities to develop an open AI ecosystem and infrastructure at the national level. This effort is intended to support scientific discovery and advance the field of AI by making tools more accessible and reliable.
Assistant Professor Dreier will act as co-principal investigator, co-leading the data curation aspect of the initiative. Her responsibilities include helping build a large dataset comprising unannotated text, images, and code that will be used to create multimodal language models. “My role builds on my own academic research that evaluates how well LLMs handle unique, idiosyncratic text generated by politicians and policymakers,” Dreier said.
Dreier will also contribute to workforce development by organizing educational sessions for UNM researchers. These sessions are designed to demonstrate how faculty can utilize the new infrastructure in their research while providing feedback on potential applications.
“My hope is that access to this cutting-edge infrastructure, training, and computing power will help train and empower our faculty and students, and, in turn, help fuel economic innovation in New Mexico,” she said.
Reflecting on her involvement with the team funded by this initiative, Dreier added: “I am honored to be working with researchers I admire, and I hope this process can jump-start waves of scientific advancement in our state and beyond.”
