The Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences and the National Science Foundation Announce New AI Institute to Accelerate Learning

The Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded approximately $20 m************** to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign to create The Institute for Inclusive and Intelligent Technologies for Education (INVITE). This institute is one of a suite of institutes launched by the federal government as part of a $500 million investment, the largest from the federal government in artificial intelligence (AI) to date.

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INVITE will create AI tools and approaches to support noncognitive skills, which refer to a set of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies thought to underpin success in school and at work. INVITE will focus on three noncognitive skills linked to effective learning: persistence, academic resilience, and collaboration. This new generation of systems will dynamically respond to learner needs, behaviors, and development and go beyond support for domain-specific achievement. More broadly, INVITE’s work will seek to reframe how learners interact with learning technologies by prioritizing approaches that consider the whole learner.

This is the second AI institute NSF and IES have funded together as part of the major investment. The University of Buffalo received an award earlier this year to establish the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education. The Institute’s research will lead to advancements in AI, human-AI interaction, and learning science to improve education outcomes for children with speech and language processing challenges.

“We are excited to partner with NSF on these two AI institutes,” says IES Director Mark Schneider. “We hope that they will provide valuable insights into how to tap modern technologies to improve the education sciences—but more importantly we hope that they will lead to better student outcomes and identify ways to free up the time of teachers to deliver more informed individualized instruction for the students they care so much about.”

The $500 million investment in AI institutes comes from partners including: Department of Defense, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; Department of Homeland Security; National Institute of Standards and Technology; United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture; and IBM.

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“The National AI Research Institutes are a critical component of our Nation’s AI innovation, infrastructure, technology, education, and partnerships ecosystem,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “These institutes will help drive discoveries that will ensure our country is at the forefront of the global AI revolution.”

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