Welcome to AIVO News! Our newsletter features projects, events, and opportunities within the NSF AI Institutes Virtual Organization community.
- To subscribe, please complete the AIVO Newsletter Signup Form.
- Contact us (at aivo@ucdavis.edu) to suggest items for an upcoming newsletter issue or to provide feedback.
January 2026 Issue
Table of Contents:
- Director’s Message: NSF AIVO 2025 Year in Review
- SAIL 2026 in Sunny San Diego
- New SIG: Foundational AI/ML
- AI AgriBench Update
- SAIL 2025 Recordings
– Recordings of Past Communications Workshops and Previous SAIL Sessions
– Sharing Institute Resources and Events - CV4Edu Workshop at CVPR 2026: Call for Papers by March 12
- Ed4AI Program Updates
– AI Ready America Workshop Participation
– AIVO Instructional Design Services - Call for Student Spotlight Nominees
Director’s Message: NSF AIVO 2025 Year in Review
A lot has happened in the AI world in the last year, and that’s also true for the AI Institutes that comprise NSF AIVO, and AIVO itself. Starting in January of 2025, our SAIL program committee, having taken a short break after SAIL ‘24, began biweekly meetings to plan a program that is actually difficult to design. They asked: “What should be on the program that would appeal to attendees from (at the time) 27 AI Institutes and would address common themes, but also provide some technical depth, be topical, and bring in thought leaders of interest, as well?”
With SAIL ‘25 being the fourth SAIL, I’ve observed a cadence of programs, swinging a bit more technical one year and less another, but all the while being responsive to the prior year’s feedback. In each case though, what started off in the Spring as a collection of ideas morphs into a program that provides something unique and special each time. Thank a committee member at some point!
Beyond the program itself, SAIL, as an AIVO convening activity, provides for the conversations in the hallways during breaks and at dinners, which continues to create bonds between us 29 Institutes that will last for years. Speaking of creating bonds, we are now seeing Institute GSRs and postdocs entering the workforce and becoming assistant professors, carrying on their passions for beneficial AI.
Although the thought has always been there: “Why no GSRs and postdocs at SAIL?” – the idea took shape in 2025, as AIVO received a grant from Google.org that funded activities in the education-about-AI space and the AI-in-education space. AIVO supported two graduate students or postdocs per Institute. If you were at SAIL ‘25, you will likely agree that they added energy to the summit, formed bonds, and even educated the seasoned faculty with their posters and conversations. We will be inviting them back for SAIL ‘26, and we’ll be in touch regarding how much underwriting we can provide.
AIVO has been funding four programs: SIGs, Workshops, IESP, and Travel. Each program has a committee that evaluates requests for funding based on guidelines. This year, we funded 6 workshops, 17 IESP travelers to 11 countries, and 67 travelers funded by the general travel grants. We also established a new Foundational AI & ML SIG and supported the inaugural in-person gathering of that group at NeurIPS. Again, thank a committee member for their help on these four committees.
AIVO has been staffed by some diligent and talented people, many of whom you know only by email address, but I know as “Team AIVO”. Our programs thus far have reflected grant-to-grant incremental funding. NSF recognized the need to provide AIVO with a horizon with which to develop longer term and more impactful programs for the Institutes, and they awarded AIVO with a five-year, $5M grant that will add new programs as well as fund the AIVO staff in a way that we can buy plastic rather than paper name plates for their desks.
During the next month, we’ll be reaching out with more information about our new AIVO 2.0 programs that will be rolled out during the next five years. Our Strategic & Implementation Plan (SIP) calls for continued support for the projects we expect, such as support for the Slack workspace, SAIL planning, and coordination of program-specific committees. We will be continuing the Workshops, SIGs, and Travel grants programs, but winding down the IESP program.
Many of the new programs or enhancements to existing programs are focused on helping Institutes amplify their messaging and engaging the public. This is important for many reasons. Long-term benefits of “playing the long game” of AI research need to be shown to the general public, including decision-makers.
The AIVO Education Portal, an AI education resource portal kickstarted with support from Google.org, allows your Institutes’ AI education to have better exposure, within a framework of hundreds of other resources not only from AIVO Institutes, but external, curated sources, as well.
We also plan to expand the concept of a resources portal to other resources. Only recently, the program managers have been discussing how we each post our publicly available repositories of such things as code and models. We plan to help your work be more findable via this portal, essentially a directory of directories, which can benefit not only the public, but also other Institutes looking for similar resources.
A major effort within AIVO 2.0 related to amplifying and engaging the public will be the creation of videos that will help tell the public the overall picture of the AI institutes, and additionally providing thematic looks across the Institutes. It will take some time for us to plan these, and along the way you might be asked to hop on a video call, provide some video you already have (B roll), or even be interviewed in person., I did some advance work on this, catching PIs and leadership at events such as ai+expo (ACTION), ai+science (CosmicAI, IAIFI, and MMLI), and just last week at AI Ready America (AI4ExceptionalEd and INVITE).
Team AIVO and I look forward to working on your behalf, to connect, convene, enable collaborations, help engage the public, and amplify your Institutes’ great work and impact during the coming year and beyond.
SAIL 2026 in Sunny San Diego
Save the Date: SAIL 2026 will be held November 2–4, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina!
Summit for AI Institutes Leadership (SAIL) 2026
November 2–4, 2026
Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina
1441 Quivira Road
San Diego, CA 92109
Stay tuned for updates about the conference program as we finalize them, along with registration details.
We can’t wait to get together in the Fall.
New SIG: Foundational AI/ML
Welcome to our eighth special interest group (SIG)! With its formation led by TILOS Managing Director Angela Berti, our newest SIG already has more than 10 Institutes participating.
Learn more about the Foundational AI/ML SIG.
AI AgriBench Update
Among farmers and other agriculture professionals, there’s widespread use of public and proprietary chatbots for generative AI ag information services. Yet they didn’t have a systematic way to assess the accuracy, relevance, or general usefulness of the answers they received.
How accurate is the agronomic advice from LLMs and AI-based agricultural advisory tools?
On January 28, the AI AgriBench consortium announced a benchmarking service for AI-based advisory services for agronomy and crop management. They developed a trusted framework to evaluate and build confidence in the new generation of digital tools that support farmers and the broader agricultural community. The first version of the AI AgriBench benchmark addresses core agronomic understanding, a key technical foundation for on-farm advice.
The CropWizard Project
The benchmarking methodology is based on research conducted within the CropWizard project of the National AI Institute, AIFARMS. It provides a transparent, expert-reviewed benchmark grounded in real-world agronomy and farm management questions drawn from land-grant university extension publications.
More about the AI AgriBench Consortium
The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign leads the AI AgriBench consortium. AI AgriBench brings together academic, industry, nonprofit, and extension partners worldwide to support trustworthy, responsible adoption of AI in agriculture. Founding and member organizations include AIFARMS, Bayer Crop Science, Extension Foundation, Kissan AI, John Deere, Microsoft, DeepRoot Strategies, Farmers Business Network, Taranis, Precision Development, and Digital Green.
The public benchmarking consortium was created to evaluate the accuracy, relevance, and practical usefulness of AI-powered advisory services for agriculture. Learn more about AI AgriBench.
SAIL 2025 Recordings
All available recordings, photos, and presentations from SAIL 2025 are available on the AIVO Intraweb. If you need alternate access, please email us at aivo@ucdavis.edu.
Recordings of Past Communications Workshops and Previous SAIL Sessions
Did you know that recordings of past SAIL sessions, including the communications workshops, are housed on the AIVO Intraweb? Access them anytime, along with other resources for Institutes.
Sharing Institute Resources & Events
Does your Institute have a communications or other type of resource to share with the Institutes community on the AIVO Intraweb? Email us at aivo@ucdavis.edu and we’ll feature it in an upcoming newsletter!
You can also add Institute events directly to the AIVO website! There’s a guide on how to update the AIVO Events Calendar.
- Log into the AIVO Intraweb.
- Access the guide in the Intraweb Guides section at the bottom of the Intraweb landing page.
CV4Edu Workshop at CVPR 2026: Call for Papers by March 12
Three 2025 AI4Ed Summer Fellows – Ekta Sood (iSAT), Joyce Horn Fonteles (EngageAI), and Mariah Bradford (iSAT) – have organized a workshop at CVPR 2026, the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. And they’re calling for papers by March 12, 2026!
They’re excited to invite submissions to CV4Edu, an interdisciplinary workshop at CVPR 2026 in Denver, bringing together researchers in AI in education, computer vision, and human-centered AI.
The workshop focuses on multimodal perception in classrooms and the challenges of building interpretable, reliable, and privacy-aware AI systems for modeling engagement, self-regulation, and collaboration in real learning environments. They welcome work on multimodal modeling, behavioral forecasting, cognitive state inference, privacy-aware benchmarks, real-world deployments, and more.
CV4Edu will include invited talks, a panel, and an open discussion aimed at defining shared challenges and directions for the community. More details can be found on the CV4Edu website: https://cv4edu.github.io/.
- Paper submission deadline: March 12
- CV4Edu Workshop website: https://cv4edu.github.io/
Ed4AI Program Updates
AI Ready America Workshop Participation
The AIVO Education Portal at education.aiinstitutes.org was discussed with attendees at the AI Ready America workshop in DC January 29–30. NSF AIVO Director Steve Brown participated in this workshop, which the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NSF funded jointly. Many of the attendees have “networks of networks” – sound familiar?
AIVO made new connections with these networks as we all address the challenges, opportunities, and strategies for educating America at all levels about AI, whether K-12, university, or workforce upskilling and re-skilling.
NSF and USDA-NIFA leadership were represented among the 100 workshop attendees, as were AIVO members INVITE PI Chad Lane, Holly Yanco (AI CARING), EngageAI Co-PI Jeremy Roschelle, and session speaker AI4ExceptionalEd PI Venu Govindaraju.
We’ll have more to report from this event, as there will be a white paper, a statement of principles, and a roadmap for future coordination, all of which will guide future AI diffusion efforts and inform federal agency activities.
AIVO Instructional Design Services
As we continue to gather resources for the AIVO Education Portal, keep in mind that we can help you create AI education resources via instructional design consulting services.
Review the service offerings presentation in the Resources section of the AIVO Intraweb.
Call for Student Spotlight Nominees
Student Spotlight: We’re scheduling interviews for upcoming feature articles and videos!
Haven’t nominated a student from your Institute for the Student Spotlight yet? Email us at aivo@ucdavis.edu with their name and email address.
We’ll handle the rest and keep you in the loop!
