Five faculty members from the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) are participating in two research projects selected for funding through the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Genesis Mission, a new initiative designed to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery.
Announced July 22 at the inaugural Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C., the DOE selected 278 projects nationwide to receive a combined $250 million in Phase I funding.
One project includes UMIACS researchers Chris Metzler, Abhinav Bhatele, Maria Molina, and Haizhao Yang, who will help develop an agentic AI framework to overcome computational bottlenecks in the DOE's long-term climate forecasting system. The team aims to improve predictions of floods and droughts, leading to more accurate, localized and long-range forecasts that can help protect critical infrastructure such as power grids and water supplies from extreme weather.
The project, led by Jinwoong Yoo, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, received $750,000 in Phase I funding.
UMIACS researcher Xiaodi Wu is part of a Virginia Tech-led project that will use AI to design more efficient quantum error-correcting codes, helping improve the accuracy and resilience of quantum information. Current approaches require extensive computing resources to protect even a single unit of quantum information, and designing better methods is computationally prohibitive. By using AI to accelerate the design process, the team hopes to develop tools that will speed advances across the quantum computing research community. The project received $720,000 in Phase I funding.
Awardees will gain access to the Genesis Mission Platform, which includes AI agent frameworks, advanced AI models and software from industry partners, and high-performance computing resources at DOE national laboratories and partner facilities. These resources will allow researchers to rapidly design, test and refine new approaches to scientific discovery. Teams selected for Phase II will scale their initial prototypes into tools with broader real-world impact.
—Story by Maria Herd, UMIACS communications group