University of Texas at Arlington researcher Habeeb Olufowobi is leading a new U.S. Department of Energy project to ensure the security and trust of artificial intelligence systems used in scientific work. [Photo: University of Texas at Arlington]
A University of Texas at Arlington researcher will lead a new, federally funded effort to keep AI systems honest and secure in some of the nation’s most sensitive scientific work.
Habeeb Olufowobi, a faculty member in UTA’s computer science and engineering department, will head the project, the school announced. The U.S. Department of Energy is putting $750,000 toward the work.
Adding a layer of trust
The project is titled “Real-Time Trust and Resilience for AI-Driven EPICS Scientific Workflows.” It centers on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System, or EPICS, an open-source software platform used at many DOE facilities, such as particle accelerators.
Those facilities increasingly use AI models to help interpret data, and those models have to be reliable.
That’s where Olufowobi’s team comes in. It is a multidisciplinary group that includes collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs, Washington State University and Metro State University, along with two UTA graduate students. Together, they will build a “trust layer” to monitor the AI models’ behavior and block any suspicious AI outputs before they have an impact on operations.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming how scientific discoveries are made, but researchers must be able to trust the recommendations these systems produce,” he said in a statement. “Our goal is to develop practical technologies that help scientists confidently use AI in some of the world’s most advanced research facilities without compromising the integrity of experiments or the reliability of scientific results.”
Part of a national effort
Olufowobi’s project is one of 278 projects across the country that will be part of the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission. The project starts Sept. 1 and is set to run through May 31.
“This project addresses a national priority by helping ensure that AI can be deployed safely and reliably in some of the world’s most advanced scientific facilities,” Hong Jiang, chair of UTA’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said in a statement.
Genesis is an initiative led by the Department of Energy aimed at using AI to advance scientific research. It “will build an integrated AI platform to harness federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs,” according to an executive order signed by President Trump in November.
What’s next for Genesis
Phase 1 of Genesis includes awards of between $500,000 and $750,000. Its projects “identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale” over a nine-month period. Projects selected for phase 2 will then receive additional larger awards and run for three years.
“The extraordinary response to this Genesis Mission application process demonstrates that America’s scientific community is ready to reimagine how discovery happens,” DOE Under Secretary for Science Dario Gil said in a release announcing the Genesis Mission projects. “Through the Genesis Mission, we are bringing together the nation’s leading researchers, institutions, and technology partners to build the next generation of scientific capability.”
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