UCSB Team Wins $1M NSF Grant to Study Higher-Order Interactions in AI
Four faculty members from UC Santa Barbara's Electrical and Computer Engineering department — Nina Miolane, Haewon Jeong, Yao Qin, and Sanjukta Krishnagopal — have won a $1 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance the mathematical foundations of AI. The project's core goal is enabling AI to identify higher-order interactions in physical systems, spanning complex systems from stars in galaxies to neurons in the brain.
Confirmed
- The $1 million grant comes from the NSF, as announced by UCSB's Electrical and Computer Engineering department
- The team consists of the four faculty members Nina Miolane, Haewon Jeong, Yao Qin, and Sanjukta Krishnagopal; Miolane herself has repeatedly shared and posted about it on social media
- The research focuses on the mathematical foundations of AI, specifically modeling higher-order interactions in physical systems
Why it matters
- According to Miolane, most existing AI for Science methods struggle to capture higher-order interactions in complex systems; this project's foundational mathematical research could fill that gap
- Higher-order interaction modeling has cross-domain potential, with astrophysics (interactions among stars) and neuroscience (interactions among neurons) both within the project's envisioned scope
2026-10-20 ~ 2026-10-20 · 5 related posts
Primary sources
- [source] UCSB team wins $1M NSF grant to model higher-order interactions in physical systems with AI — ninamiolane · 2026-10-20
- UCSB Team Wins $1M NSF Award to Study Mathematical Foundations of How AI Learns Interactions — ninamiolane · 2026-10-20
3 near-duplicate retellings: ninamiolane · ninamiolane · ninamiolane