October 24, 2019
Computer science department participating in NSF C-Accel Pilot
Kansas State University is receiving research funding under the Open Knowledge Network track of the new Convergence Accelerator Pilot, known as C-Accel, by the National Science Foundation.
Pascal Hitzler, professor of computer science, is part of a team led by Krzysztof Janowicz, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, involving additional partners from academia, industry and federal agencies. The team will develop artificial intelligence based models, methods and services for representing, retrieving, linking and predicting spatial and temporal data from a highly diverse set of public knowledge graphs that range across topics such as soil health and the historic slave trade.
The new NSF Convergence Accelerator Pilot program is set to "bring teams together to focus on grand challenges of national importance that require a convergence approach […] and have a high probability of resulting in deliverables that will benefit society within a fixed term."
NSF is funding several teams under this program in an effort that will lead to the development of public knowledge graphs which in turn have "the potential to drive innovation across all areas of science and engineering, and unleash the power of data and artificial intelligence to achieve scientific discovery and economic growth." The funding program is highly competitive and had an acceptance rate of only 8.5%.