Listen to this article 3 min
Prairie View A&M University is making strides when it comes to research with the help of a $1.5 million award from NASA.
The money, which is being distributed over a three-year period, will go toward creating a system that uses artificial intelligence to share interactive, instantaneous and user-relevant information in a manner that is easily accessible and discoverable for an audience beyond engineers and scientists.
PVAMU will lead the effort in collaboration with Texas Southern University and Texas A&M University-College Station.
The general purpose is to create a question-answering system, similar to Chat GPT, Lijun Qian, a regents professor at PVAMU and lead researcher on this project, told the Houston Business Journal. In AI, question-answering has become a crucial application, and the proposed system will essentially take a question from a general audience and map it to the terminologies that are used by NASA scientists, Qian said.
“The project PVAMU proposed, the goal is to build an AI-based system that will be able to share earth science information from NASA databases to a more broad audience like students and the general audience from all over the world, not just scientists and engineers,” Qian said.
Another goal is to hire both graduate and undergraduate students to work as research assistants for the project, Qian said. New courses and modules, such as scientific machine learning and research results from the NASA project, will be created and delivered in all three participating institutions.
Summer programs that will allow students to train to become an independent researcher will also be offered.
Another aspect of the project is workforce development. The universities will work with NASA scientists and program managers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to offer summer internships to students. This will allow students to fully engage in the field.
“We are trying to help train the next generation workforce specifically for NASA,” Qian said.
Along with opportunities for current university students, outreach activities for K-12 students are also going to be offered. Qian said summer camps will help attract students to the emerging field of AI machine learning and analytics.
With the $1.5 million as seed funding, PVAMU will also establish a NASA Data Science Equity, Access, and Priority in Research and Education (DEAP) Institute to accelerate innovation, he said. This will be housed in the College of Engineering. Work in the institute will begin in May, with research, education and outreach activities starting in the summer.
NASA’s funding for PVAMU is part of a larger effort to enhance research at historically Black colleges and universities. Overall, NASA awarded $11.7 million to eight HBCUs through the new DEAP opportunity. The hope is to improve diversity and inclusion in the workforce of the future, Qian said.
“The increasing use of data science at NASA and beyond really drives home the need for a future workforce with data science knowledge,” Mike Kincaid, associate administrator of NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, said in a release. “With our newest collaboration, NASA created an exciting pathway to find new talent at HBCUs.”
Overall, Qian said he is hopeful that this work will help PVAMU as it navigates its way to becoming the first HBCU to receive R1 status, the highest-tier classification for research, from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. In January 2022, it was announced that the university is one of 10 HBCUs with an R2 status and one of only four Texas A&M University System members in this category.
PVAMU also recently launched its National Center for Infrastructure Transformation with a $20 million grant, the largest competitive research award the university has received in its history, according to university officials.
