AI Research
NSF invests $100M in AI research institutes

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $100 million investment, made jointly with Capital One and Intel, to fund five National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes and a community hub.
The goal of the pact is to enable the institutes to pursue fundamental AI research, aiming to translate discoveries into practical applications. The program also supports national AI workforce development through outreach to high schools, universities and industry, according to the announcement.
AI-MI at Cornell
The AI‑Materials Institute (AI‑MI), led by Cornell University, will use AI to accelerate discovery of materials for energy, sustainability and quantum technologies. The institute plans a cloud‑based portal called the AI Materials Science Ecosystem that integrates large‑language models with experimental data, simulations, images and scientific literature. Building on the popular arXiv research paper repository that Cornell hosts, AIMS-EC will facilitate work on several fronts, including discovering two-dimensional moiré structures with properties suitable for robust quantum bits, designing new superconductors and developing molecules for removal of microplastics from the environment. The institute will also train students at all levels through partnerships with schools, universities and industry. NSF’s news release says that AI‑MI will “create the AI Materials Science Ecosystem, a cloud‑based portal that integrates large language models with experimental data, simulations, images and scientific literature.”
The Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML)
The Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), led by University of Texas at Austin, builds on work begun in 2020 to develop new foundational tools for generative AI, including diffusion models that power generative‑AI tools like Stable Diffusion 3 and Flux. In its next phase the institute will expand generative‑AI research into domains such as protein engineering and clinical imaging and develop methods for handling noisy data and improving model reliability, particularly for health applications. The institute comprises researchers from a string of other research centers. The NSF notes that IFML’s work on diffusion models underpins widely used generative models and that the new award will develop tools to “expand generative AI to new domains … including protein engineering and clinical imaging” and “develop new methods to handle noisy data and improve model reliability”. IFML members were instrumental in developing coursework for a new Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) degree program at UT Austin, addressing the demand for a highly skilled AI workforce.
The Institute for Student AI‑Teaming (iSAT)
The Institute for Student AI‑Teaming (iSAT), led by University of Colorado Boulder, develops AI partners that help student groups learn together by facilitating discussion, exploration and reasoning. More than 6,000 middle‑school students and educators have used iSAT’s tools. The center’s researchers have developed two AI “partners,” CoBi (Community Builder) and the Jigsaw Interactive Agent (JIA), which they’ve tested in real-world classrooms. The next phase will develop a semester‑long curriculum and expand AI literacy. NSF’s summary describes iSAT’s AI partners that facilitate group learning and notes that over 6,000 middle‑school students and educators have participated. It adds that the institute will “co‑develop a semester‑long curriculum” to build AI literacy. The institute brings together researchers from nine universities spanning 15 research areas, working with school district partners.
The Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI)
The Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI), led by University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign, uses AI and machine learning to speed up discovery and creation of molecules for medicine, materials and clean energy. In its first five years, the institute has resulted in 166 journal and conference papers, 11 patent disclosures. That includes six that have been licensed and two start-up companies. Accomplishments include the creation of AlphaSynthesis, an AI-enabled platform that helps researchers plan and execute chemical synthesis. In its next phase the institute will develop advanced AI tools, including new language models and intelligent agents, that can reason, predict and help design useful molecules such as drugs, catalysts and new materials. The institute brings together a team of chemists, engineers, and AI experts from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Pennsylvania State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The AI Institutes Virtual Organization (AIVO)
The AI Institutes Virtual Organization (AIVO), led by University of California Davis, serves as a national hub that connects federally funded AI institutes, government stakeholders and the public. Building on a pilot launched in 2022, AIVO coordinates events, networking tools and collaboration support to create a cohesive innovation ecosystem and serves as a nexus for the 29 AI Institutes, organizing annual summits for AI institutes’ leadership. AIVO will amplify the work of the institutes and promote public engagement. NSF states that AIVO will expand on a 2022 pilot to connect AI institutes and government stakeholders, foster communication through events and networking tools, help form public‑private partnerships and raise awareness of how AI can address real‑world challenges.
The AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA)
The AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA), led by Brown University, focuses on accelerating the development of next‑generation AI assistants that are safer, more effective and adaptable to individual user needs. The institute’s work will focus on the potential for use in mental and behavioral health, where trust and safety are of the utmost importance, combining research on human and machine cognition to create AI systems that can interpret a person’s unique behavioral needs and provide helpful feedback in real time. The NSF announcement summarizes ARIA’s mission as developing “next‑generation AI assistants that are safer, more effective, and better able to adapt to individual user needs”.
Context within U.S. policy
The investment aligns with the White House AI Action Plan and Executive Order 14277 (see America’s AI Action Plan for more) on advancing AI education. According to the NSF, the AI institutes are intended to “translate cutting‑edge research into scalable, practical solutions that improve lives” and to build a national infrastructure for AI education and workforce development; the program will train researchers, empower educators and reach into communities.
Internationally, Europe, Israel, the UAE and other countries are launching national AI institutes, supercomputers and safety programs, signaling a global race to develop AI capabilities and governance frameworks. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense’s contracts with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI illustrate how commercial AI leaders are becoming essential defense suppliers, challenging incumbents such as Palantir.
AI Research
Nursa Launches Artificial Intelligence for Nurse Scheduling

Nursa Intelligence Assistant enables rapid posting of single or bulk shifts
SALT LAKE CITY, September 04, 2025–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nursa, a nationwide platform that exists to put a nurse at the bedside of every patient in need, today announced the launch of an artificial intelligence assistant that enables healthcare facilities to rapidly generate shift listings within the Nursa platform. The first-of-its-kind smart scheduling tool helps organizations post single or bulk shifts within seconds so they can reach qualified, available clinicians immediately.
Active now within the Nursa platform, the Nursa Intelligence Assistant or “NIA,” allows post creation three ways: users can speak directly to NIA, describing their shift needs; they can take a photo of relevant shift information, even if it’s a handwritten scribble; and they can upload any spreadsheet or file used to track scheduling. From there, NIA fills in the details, letting users review and edit, and confirm pricing, before posting.
Carlee Scholl, staffing coordinator at Sullivan Park Care Center in Spokane, Wash., manages up to 150 shifts per month and recently began using NIA to schedule individual and bulk shifts. She described the experience as quick and accurate, with the AI assistant capturing all the details perfectly. “I just looked it over to make sure it was everything that I needed,” she said. “It was spot on.”
“Artificial Intelligence is opening up new opportunities to streamline cumbersome workflows so healthcare facilities can focus on the important business of delivering quality patient care,” said Curtis Anderson, CEO and founder of Nursa. “With NIA, facilities eliminate the repetitive typing and data entry of shift posting by generating one or thousands of shifts in just seconds. We’re redefining what fast and easy staffing feels like, and this is just the beginning.”
For more information on how Nursa helps healthcare facilities, hospitals and health systems solve staffing needs with qualified clinicians, visit nursa.com.
About Nursa
Nursa is a nationwide platform that exists to put a nurse at the bedside of every patient in need, removing the financial strain and operational gaps of traditional staffing agencies. Nursa’s technology enables hospitals, health systems, skilled nursing facilities and community organizations to easily secure reliable, qualified, nursing talent for per diem shifts and contract work. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Nursa is trusted by a growing community of more than 3,400 facilities and 400,000 nurses nationwide and is accredited by The Joint Commission. For more information, visit nursa.com.
AI Research
Artificial intelligence helps Hispanic homebuyers navigate mortgage process

For many Hispanics the road to homeownership is filled with obstacles, including loan officers who don’t speak Spanish or aren’t familiar with buyers who may not fit the boxes of a traditional mortgage applicant.
Some mortgage experts are turning to artificial intelligence to bridge the gap. They want AI to help loan officers find the best lender for a potential homeowner’s specific situation, while explaining the process clearly and navigating residency, visa or income requirements.
This new use of a bilingual AI has the potential to better serve homebuyers in Hispanic and other underrepresented communities. And it’s launching as federal housing agencies have begun to switch to English-only services, part of President Donald Trump’s push to make it the official language of the United States. His executive order in August called the change a way to “reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society.”
The number of limited-English households tripled over the past four decades, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. The institute says these households struggle to navigate the mortgage process, making it difficult for them to own a home, which is a key factor in building generational wealth.
Bilingual AI helps demystify home loans
The nonprofit Hispanic Organization of Mortgage Experts launched an AI platform built on ChatGPT last week, which lets loan officers and mortgage professionals quickly search the requirements of more than 150 lenders, instead of having to contact them individually.
The system, called Wholesale Search, uses an internal database that gives customized options for each buyer. HOME also offers a training program for loan officers called Home Certified with self-paced classes on topics like income and credit analysis, compliance rules and intercultural communication.
Cubie Hernandez, the organization’s chief technology and learning officer, said the goal is to help families have confidence during the mortgage process while pushing the industry to modernize. “Education is the gateway to opportunity,” he said.
HOME founder Rogelio Goertzen said the platform is designed to handle complicated cases like borrowers without a Social Security number, having little to no credit history, or being in the U.S. on a visa.
Faster applications for buyers
Loan officer Danny Velazquez of GFL Capital said the platform has changed his work. Before, he had to contact 70 lenders one by one, wait for answers and sometimes learn later that they wouldn’t accept the buyer’s situation.
The AI tool lets him see requirements in one place, narrow the list and streamline the application. “I am just able to make the process faster and get them the house,” Velazquez said.
A homebuyer’s experience
One of Velazquez’s recent clients was Heriberto Blanco-Joya, 38, who bought his first home this year in Las Vegas. Spanish is Blanco-Joya’s first language, so he and his wife expected the process to be confusing.
Velazquez told him exactly what paperwork he needed, explained whether his credit score was enough to buy a home, and answered questions quickly.
“He provided me all the information I needed to buy,” Blanco-Joya said. “The process was pleasant and simple.”
From their first meeting to closing day took about six weeks.
Safeguards for accuracy
Mortgage experts and the platform’s creators acknowledge that artificial intelligence creates new risks. Families rely on accurate answers about loans, immigration status and credit requirements. If AI gives wrong information, the consequences could be serious.
Goertzen, the CEO of HOME, said his organization works to reduce errors by having the AI pull information directly from lenders and loan officers. The platform’s database is updated whenever new loan products appear, and users can flag any problems to the developers.
“When there are things that are incorrect, we are constantly correcting it,” Goertzen said. “AI is a great tool, but it doesn’t replace that human element of professionalism, and that is why we are constantly tweaking and making sure it is correct.”
Loan officers welcome AI support
Jay Rodriguez, a mortgage broker at Arbor Financial Group, said figuring out the nuances of different investors’ requirements can mean the difference between turning a family away and getting them approved.
Rodriguez said HOME’s AI platform is especially helpful for training new loan officers and for coaching teams on how to better serve their communities.
Another company is testing similar AI tools
Better Home & Finance Holding Company, an AI-powered mortgage lender, has created an AI platform called Tinman. It helps loan officers find lenders for borrowers who have non-traditional income or documents, which is common among small business owners.
They also built a voice-based assistant called Betsy that manages more than 127,000 borrower interactions each month. A Spanish-language version is in development.
“Financial literacy can be challenging for Hispanic borrowers or borrowers in other underserved populations,” said Leah Price, vice president of Tinman platform. “Tools like Betsy can interact and engage with customers in a way that feels supportive and not judgmental.”
AI Research
Researchers Empower AI Companions With Spatiotemporal Reasoning For Dynamic Real-world Understanding

The ability to understand and respond to specific references within a video, relating to both where and when events occur, represents a crucial next step for artificial intelligence. Honglu Zhou, Xiangyu Peng, Shrikant Kendre, and colleagues at Salesforce AI Research address this challenge with Strefer, a novel framework that empowers Video LLMs with advanced spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities. Strefer generates synthetic instruction data, effectively teaching these models to interpret fine-grained spatial and temporal references within dynamic video footage, without relying on expensive or time-consuming human annotation. This approach significantly improves a Video LLM’s ability to understand complex instructions involving specific objects, locations, and moments in time, paving the way for more versatile and perceptually grounded AI companions capable of interacting with the real world. The results demonstrate that models trained with Strefer-generated data outperform existing methods on tasks requiring precise spatial and temporal understanding, establishing a new benchmark for instruction-tuned video analysis.
Data Synthesis and VLM Evaluation Strategies
This research details a project focused on building more robust and accurate Video Language Models (VLMs) to improve their ability to understand and reason about video content, particularly in complex scenarios involving temporal reasoning, object localization, and nuanced descriptions. The core goal is to address limitations of existing VLMs, which often struggle with tasks requiring precise temporal understanding or grounding in specific video segments. The project relies heavily on generating synthetic data to target the weaknesses of existing VLMs, challenging the model in areas where it struggles. This is achieved through a process called Strefer, and the data covers a wide range of tasks categorized as open-ended question answering, multiple-choice question answering, temporal reasoning, object localization, and reasoning about actions and behaviors.
The data format varies, specifying how much of the video is used as input, and whether frames are extracted from a segment or the full video. Many tasks have mask-refer versions, where the question focuses on a specific region of interest in the video, forcing the model to ground its answers in the visual content. To improve the model’s ability to understand time, the research uses a technique that discretizes continuous time into segments, representing each segment with a temporal token added to the language model’s vocabulary. This allows it to process time-related information more effectively. Existing models struggle with understanding complex video content when queries rely on precise spatial locations or specific moments in time. Strefer addresses this limitation by systematically creating detailed, object-centric metadata from videos, including the location of subjects and objects as tracked over time, and their associated actions. This innovative approach leverages a modular system of pre-trained models, including Large Language Models and multimodal vision foundation models, to pseudo-annotate videos with temporally dense information.
By building upon this structured metadata, Strefer guides language models in generating high-quality instruction data specifically designed to train Video LLMs in understanding and responding to complex spatiotemporal references. Unlike existing datasets, Strefer automatically produces instruction-response pairs at scale, grounded in the dynamic, object-centric structures within videos. Current models struggle with detailed spatial and temporal reasoning, particularly when interpreting gestures or time-based cues in user queries. Strefer addresses this limitation by automatically generating synthetic training data that includes rich, detailed information about objects, their locations, and actions occurring at specific moments in time. By using a combination of existing AI models to annotate videos with this detailed metadata, Strefer creates a large dataset without the need for costly human annotation.
Experiments demonstrate that video models trained with this synthetically generated data outperform existing models on tasks requiring spatial and temporal disambiguation, showing enhanced reasoning abilities. The authors acknowledge that the framework relies on the accuracy of the underlying AI models used for annotation. Future work may focus on refining the annotation process and exploring the application of Strefer to more complex real-world scenarios.
👉 More information
🗞 Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data
🧠 ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03501
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