Professor Terence Tao, UCLA Computer Scientists Awarded Laude Moonshots Grant to Build AI System as Research Partner

Image Courtesy of Laude Institute

“A team of six UCLA faculty members spanning artificial intelligence, computer science and mathematics has received a $250,000 seed grant from the Laude Institute as part of its inaugural Moonshots initiative, which supports university-led efforts to solve some of humanity’s hardest, undiscovered problems.

The UCLA team was one of just eight selected from 125 proposals by more than 600 researchers across 47 institutions in the U.S. and Canada, as announced by the Laude Institute today. Led by Amit Sahai, a professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, other UCLA computer scientists include professor Raghu Meka, department chair Wei Wang, and associate professors Kai-Wei Chang and Nanyun (Violet) Peng. Terence Tao, a UCLA mathematics professor and director of special projects at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, is part of the team as well.”

Read the full article here.

UCLA Research Team Signs $5M Contract with DARPA for AI Research

Image Courtesy of DARPA expMath webpage.

UCLA recently signed a $5 Million Dollar Contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the expMath: Exponentiating Mathematics initiative. Professors Wei Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, Terence Tao, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, and Amit Sahai are involved in this effort led by PI Wei Wang. 

Exponentiating Mathematics (expMath) was created to accelerate the progress of pure mathematics by developing an AI co-author capable of proposing and proving useful abstractions. expMath has recruited teams from various institutions to focus on developing AI capable of auto decomposition, autoformalization, and evaluation with respect to professional-level mathematics. This program builds on prior work, including that of Professor Terence Tao on formalizing mathematical arguments in the proof assistant language Lean.

Response from Professor Terence Tao

“I’m excited to be working with Andrea and my CS colleagues on how to combine modern AI tools, knowledge graph representations, and formal verification to meet the DARPA challenge of automatically decomposing and then formalizing mathematical proofs at scale, which could potentially generate many new ways we can use the mathematical literature.  Definitely a different type of project than the pure math projects I am more accustomed to!” 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of War (DoW).

Learn more about the DARPA ExpMath here.

Watch the DARPA ExpMath introduction video here.