Welcome to AIVO News! Our newsletter features projects, events, and opportunities within the NSF AI Institutes Virtual Organization community.
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December 2025 Issue
Table of Contents:
- Happy New Year from NSF AIVO
- SAIL 2025 SIG & Workshop Recordings
- PM SIG White Paper on Team Science
- Institutes’ Job Announcements
- Sharing Your Research News Publicly
- Happenings in the Ed4AI Program
- Spotlight on Ag Institutes: AIFS Year-End Activities
- AIFS Sponsors AgTech Workshop for Industry
- IAFP2026 AI Benchmarking Student Competition on Predictive Food Safety Models: Registration Closes December 31, 2025
Happy New Year from NSF AIVO
Season’s Greetings! The close of 2025 is right around the corner, and we’re thinking back on all the special moments this year.
Let’s look back at what happened in the AI Institutes community:
- Welcomed two new AI Institutes – ARIA and AI-MI
- Held the first AI4Ed Summer Fellows Program
- Sold out the Summit for AI Institutes Leadership Conference (SAIL)
- Debuted a GSR and Postdoc Workshop and track at SAIL 2025
- Kicked off NSF AIVO strategic & implementation plan (SIP) planning
- Formed a new SIG, Foundational AI and ML Research
- Comprising an initial group of members from ACTION, AI4OPT, AI-SDM, ARNI, ATHENA, CosmicAI, IAIFI, IFML, SkAI, TILOS, ICICLE, and AI4ExceptionalEd
Looking ahead to 2026
SAIL 2026 planning is underway. It will be our fifth annual SAIL conference. How time flies!
While we’ve already begun the planning, there’s still time to join the planning committee. And if you attended SAIL 2025 and haven’t completed our post-event survey, please do! We’ll look at implementing your recommendations for SAIL 2026.
We can’t wait to make more memories with you next year.
We’ve also officially kicked off SIP planning. Jim Donlon visited the NSF AIVO team at UC Davis December 15–16, 2025 for a two-day conference on our integrative AI strategy. AIVO is embarking on a new phase with a myriad of projects that carry out our strategic objectives.
You can look forward to multimedia production, new features on the NSF AIVO website, and more next year. We’re thrilled to partner closely with NSF on these projects over the five-year grant term.
– Warmest wishes from Steve, Kiran, Phong, John, Dalia, Camille, Lukas, Parisa, and Ivor
SAIL 2025 SIG & Workshop Recordings
SIGs and Workshop Day recordings from SAIL are now available on the AIVO Intraweb!
- Due to technical issues during the conference, recordings are only available for some sessions and/or are truncated.
- If you attended SAIL and are not an AI Institute member, contact AIVO to request access to the recordings.
The rest of the recordings from SAIL (October 22–23, 2025) will be available on the AIVO Intraweb in the new year.
PM SIG White Paper on Team Science
The white paper is in its final stages. At SAIL 2025, Norman Gottron, Co-Lead of the PM SIG, shared a few key themes emerging in the draft:
- Fostering collective intelligence
- Strengthening group dynamics
- Improving operational efficiency
- Cultivating relationships across disciplines
The white paper offers recommendations for funding agencies, academic institutions, and research organizations. Stay tuned for more updates on the paper!
The PM SIG meeting panel consisted of PMs whose Institute just finished year one, year 2, is in year three, and just finished years 4 and year 5 – giving the spectrum of experience across grant maturity.
Watch the SAIL recording on the AIVO Intraweb to hear all their insights and access the meeting presentation.
Institutes’ Job Announcements Posters & Videos on NSF AIVO Website
Did you know that NSF AIVO maintains an online repository of job openings at AI Institutes?
You can find the post from our homepage or directly in the News & Events section: aiinstitutes.org/open-jobs/.
If you’re in the job market, check out these exciting roles that are currently available:
- CosmicAI Fellow — NRAO: Apply by December 31, 2025
- MMLI Communications Manager: Apply by January 5, 2026
Please help us spread the word about the openings!
Sharing Your Research News Publicly
We’re gathering stories about NSF-funded activities — including AI research, public outreach, education, and workforce development efforts — to feature on the NSF AIVO website. Partially NSF-funded research is of interest, too. Send your info to aivo@ucdavis.edu and we’ll follow up after reviewing your materials.
Coordination with NSF OLPA
NSF AIVO coordinates with the NSF OLPA to announce AI Institute news through NSF’s channels. It’s a great way to amplify press releases and communicate your endeavors widely.
We’re also interested in learning about newsworthy research when it’s submitted to a publication, so we can prepare outreach resources in advance. We’ll strictly adhere to publication embargo restrictions.
How to contribute: If you have any suggestions for NSF AI stories, especially successes in the realms of research and workforce development, please share them with us at aivo@ucdavis.edu.
Happenings in the Ed4AI Program
With the Google.org grant, NSF AIVO continues to build out the AIVO Education Portal with AI educational resources. Accessible from the top-level navigation of the AIVO homepage or directly at education.aiinstitutes.org/, the Portal is focusing on Institute-generated content at the moment.
We are particularly looking for links from the five education AI institutes, in addition to what all of us have created in the way of instructional materials. Please email Camille (ciwoods@ucdavis.edu) and Steve (sfbrown@ucdavis.edu) with your links.
Spotlight on Ag Institutes: AIFS Year-End Activities
The AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS), which is one of the five Ag Institutes first established under a partnership between the U.S. National Science Foundation and USDA NIFA, is closing out 2025 with a final Speaker Series and these activities.
AIFS and Western SARE Sponsor AgTech Workshop for Industry
AIFS and Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (Western SARE) recently hosted a two-day, in-person workshop at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to help growers, extension agents, farm managers, and other agriculture professionals understand and apply innovative tools for smart farming. The session covered new technologies that are reshaping agriculture – including drones, sensors, robotics, and AI.
The workshop featured hands-on demos of cutting-edge tools in action; direct access to university researchers developing practical solutions; real-world applications for labor-saving robotics, precision irrigation, crop monitoring, and more; and actionable knowledge to evaluate new tools and make informed decisions.
Participants learned about:
- the Foundations of AI
- Safety and health in farm robotics
- AIi-enabled yield estimation
- Controlled environment agriculture
- Precision irrigation management
- Vision language models
- Robotics and automation
- Drone technology
Plus they saw the harvesting aid, Grapebot, automatically navigate to pickers to gather their trays, saving them time to continue picking. And partici[pants tested a VR headset with the drone’s view in real time as it flew over the orchard.
Attendee comments were positive:
- “Super helpful workshop. It significantly improved my understanding of AI, robot architecture and aerial sensing.”
- “Deeply enjoyed the workshop! All speakers did an amazing job of taking complex ideas and simplifying them along with practical application examples.”
- “I really loved this workshop! I learned so much about the latest Ag technology and was impressed with the speakers’ ability to convey complex topics to us. I also loved that the group of workshop attendees was very diverse; farmers, industry people, and academics which was a great opportunity for networking.”
- “Thank you for the excellent presentations and fascinating insights. Truly an inspirational program. Now, need to experiment with some of the presented tech.”
The workshop was made possible by support from the Western SARE program and AIFS.
IAFP2026 AI Benchmarking Student Competition on Predictive Food Safety Models: Registration Closes December 31, 2025
Working individually or in teams of up to four, undergraduate and graduate students have the opportunity to help improve food safety through the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) 2026 AI Benchmarking Student Competition on Predictive Food Safety Models.
Using the Cornell Food Safety ML Repository, Agroknow’s Foodakai platform, and computer vision datasets, the goal of the challenge is to develop Al, ML, and DL models that forecast and detect food safety risks across the supply chain.
The AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS) is one of the challenge supporters. Get details about the competition on the AIFS website or review the competition flyer.
Register for the competition by December 31, 2025.
