Harvesting the Data Revolution: Annual HDR Ecosystem Conference held at the University of Illinois

By: Mark Neubauer
November 27, 2024

The 3rd annual conference of the NSF HDR Ecosystem was held on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from the 9th to the 12th of September 2024

Attendees of the 2024 HDR Ecosystem Conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Venue

Conference Welcome and Overview

Dean Rashid Bashir of the Illinois Grainger College of Engineering kickoffs of conference with a welcome and vision
A3D3 Institute Director Shih-Chieh Hsu (U. Washington) describes the Institute’s Accomplishments, Activities, Plans

Keynote

Vipin Kumar (Minnesota) delivers the Keynote talk on Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning: A New Framework for Accelerating Scientific Discovery and Addressing Global Environmental Challenges

Evening Public Lecture

Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown University) delivers a Free and Open Public Lecture on AI Policy toward Making AI Safe, Effective and Trustworthy

Transdisciplinary and Cross-Cutting Research Breakouts

Participants joined discussion breakout sessions to discuss topics including LLMs / Foundation Models for Research, Responsible AI / Ethical AI, Knowledge-Guided ML / Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Continuous ML and Human-in-the-Loop Decision Making, Future ML challenges, Challenges and Opportunities for HDR Institutes and NAIRR Integration, and Interdisciplinary Careers

Lightning Talks and Poster Session

Participants give a 1-minute poster pitch talk on their topic before moving to the poster room to chat with others about their posters

Official Launch of the HDR Machine Learning Challenge!

A3D3 Deputy Director Phil Harris talks to the audience about the inaugural NSF HDR ML Challenge

Tour of the National Petascale Computing Facility

Brett Bode (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) gives conference attendees a tour of the computing facilities at Illinois. The DeltaAI supercomputer (center) was launched a month after the tour.