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.
November 2025 Issue
Table of Contents:
- NSF AIVO Programs for Collaboration
- Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission
- SAIL 2025: Slides and Photos Available
- Graduate Student and Postdoc Workshop Research Posters & Videos
- In the AI Institutes Community
- AIFS-Sponsored “Summit for AI in Food Product Development” and White Paper
- Advancing AI in Agriculture through Large-Scale Collaborative Research
- NSF IAIFI Video Collaboration
- NSF AI-SDM’s Summer Workshop for High School Educators
NSF AIVO Programs for Collaboration
NSF AIVO administers the following programs which benefit the AI Institutes community:
- SIGs Program: Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within AIVO can request funding for venue costs and leadership travel related to SIG meetings that are either stand-alone or are conducted as a connected convening event adjacent in location and time to a conference. For a listing of the AIVO SIGs, go to our website and scroll down to the SIGs.
- Workshops Program: Similar to the SIGs program, workshops can be stand-alone or conference-adjacent. The difference is that workshops are designed to appeal to a wider audience than SIG meetings.
- IESP Program: The International Engagement Support Program (IESP) supports travel internationally for institutes to have meaningful engagements with international collaborators. The travel needs to further an Institute’s mission more so than going to a conference.
- Travel Grants Program: This program, which exhausted its original funding, has been funded during Year 1 of AIVO 2.0. Each Institute can request up to $2,700 in travel reimbursements, with trips to be taken and reimbursed by August 2026.
All Requests
For all requests, we advise close communication with your Institute’s program manager (PM), so that they know what the requests are and can help organize and triage requests if needed. Links to request forms are available on the AIVO IntraWeb under “Program Forms & Procedures.” Your PM can help you with the links if needed.
Instructions are in the top section of each form:
DOE’s Genesis Mission
National effort to accelerate the application of AI for transformative scientific discovery focused on pressing national challenges
A recent presidential action, Launching the Genesis Mission, highlights 6 science and technology areas for the effort — with an aim to identify 20 areas total by January 23, 2026. Read the action.
SAIL 2025: Slides and Photos Available
The presentations for Days 1 and 2 of SAIL and all event photos are now available on the AIVO Intraweb.
- Log into the Intraweb.
- On the Intraweb home page, scroll down to the Event Recordings section.
- Click on SAIL 2025 tile.
- On the SAIL 2025 Recordings page, scroll down to the slide decks and photos.
Recordings coming soon: Stay tuned for recordings of the conference. Due to technical issues, several recordings aren’t available or have been truncated. We apologize for the difficulties with Zoom during the event!
SIG & Workshop presentations: If you’d like to share your workshop or SIG slides with all SAIL attendees, please email them to AIVO and we’ll post them.
Graduate Student and Postdoc Workshop: Research Posters & Videos on NSF AIVO Website
We’re planning to post the posters and videos made for the workshop on the NSF AIVO website.
If you don’t want your submissions posted, please email AIVO to let us know.
In the AI Institutes Community
Have a milestone or an event to share with the community? Contact AIVO at aivo@ucdavis.edu to share the good news.
Add Your Events to the NSF AIVO Website: There’s a guide on how to update the AIVO events calendar. Access the guide on the AIVO Intraweb (login required) in the Intraweb Guides section at the bottom of the Intraweb landing page.
From precision formulation and rapid prototyping to sensory analytics and sustainable packaging, AI is enabling smarter, faster, and more consumer-responsive approaches to product innovation!
On October 13, 2025, the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS), held the inaugural AI for Food Product Development Symposium at the University of California, Davis.
The cross-sector gathering was designed to catalyze innovation at the intersection of AI and food science. The symposium brought together a curated group of researchers, industry professionals, government representatives, and technology innovators to explore how AI is transforming the way food products are designed, developed, and commercialized, culminating in a white paper.
Read the white paper: The Future of Food: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Food Manufacturing
Watch video presentations from the event: AI for Food Product Development Playlist
Upcoming AIFS Events
AIFS Speaker Series: AIFS’ next event is a hybrid, public talk on Tuesday, December 9 from noon-1:00 p.m. – the last event in the Institute’s 2025 Speaker Series. The session, “Demystifying AI for Food,” features Manmit Shrimali and includes a tech platform demo. Register now!
Watch previous Speaker Series sessions on YouTube.
Advancing AI in Agriculture through Large-Scale Collaborative Research
The five USDA AI Institutes – AgAID, AIFARMS, AIFS, AIIRA, and AI-LEAF – collaborated on the recently published article, “Advancing AI in Agriculture through Large-Scale Collaborative Research.”
Part of a special issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM), entitled Federal Funding of Academic Research, the article highlights how federal funding of the AI Institutes has a broad range of societal impacts, particularly on agriculture and the food system.
The National AI Institutes Program in general is highlighted in this paragraph from the opening section:
“Federal funding of the AI Institutes program has been the key enabler for its broad range of impacts. The program made an important strategic choice in investing in societal applications of AI advances, combining foundational and use-inspired AI research to address important challenges in a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, education, trustworthy AI, chemical manufacturing, cybersecurity, law, physics, optimization, decision making, cyberinfrastructure, edge computing and networking, and astronomy. This has brought many core AI researchers into close collaboration with researchers in numerous other disciplines, addressing important societal problems and advancing the frontiers of AI itself, but motivated by specific application areas. The five AG-AI institutes exemplify all these benefits. Numerous AI experts who had never worked on agriculture or food problems before are now collaborating closely with agriculture and food researchers to address problems in these domains.”
NSF IAIFI Video Collaboration: The Physics of A.I.
IAIFI collaborated with the popular YouTube channel ScienceClic on an educational video that explores the connections between AI and Physics, as related to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the link between neural networks and quantum fields.
NSF AI-SDM’s Summer Workshop for High School Educators
Are you a teacher or administrator who is passionate about incorporating AI and its societal implications into curriculum?
Join AI-SDM for a five-day interdisciplinary workshop to learn the core principles behind AI and machine learning!
Through hands-on activities using free and easily accessible computing platforms, you’ll discover how AI works and explore its impact on human decision-making in the criminal justice system, public policy, the allocation of scarce resources, and medical diagnoses.
Learn effective strategies for the use of generative AI in the classroom and gain a set of teacher-tested units and assignments, ready to be implemented where appropriate into existing curriculum. Learn more about the workshop.
No prior coding, computer science, or AI background is required to attend. Applications are due by January 16, 2026.
