The Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence has announced recipients of its 2024-25 AI Seed Grant Program. Led by researchers from across 19 academic departments, the projects will leverage artificial intelligence to enhance interdisciplinary research. 

“We received over 100 proposals, far more than we anticipated, and a strong indicator of the interest in artificial intelligence across campus,” said AI Lab Director Tom Griffiths. “We look forward to seeing how each of these projects progress at our Collaboration Symposium this fall.”

The funded proposals were chosen for their quality, originality, potential impact, and fit with the goals of current research initiatives within the AI Lab.  Proposals were reviewed by the executive committees associated with those research initiatives. Princeton faculty from across the entire campus were eligible to apply. 

“Given the overwhelming interest this year, we were only able to fund a small subset of the proposals, and unfortunately had to turn down many excellent proposals,” said Griffiths, who is also Princeton’s Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture of Psychology and Computer Science. “We encourage faculty to submit again next year as our funding for seed grants is refreshed.”

Proposals were typically supported by one or more of the initiatives within the AI Lab: Princeton Language and Intelligence (PLI), AI for Accelerating Invention (AI2), and Natural and Artificial Minds (NAM). A small number of proposals fell outside the scope of these initiatives and were reviewed for their potential to expand the scope of AI-related research supported on campus. 

2024-25 AI Lab Seed Grant Recipients 

“Accelerating Continuous Protein Evolution with Machine Learning”
Jared Toettcher, associate professor of molecular biology; Cameron Myhrvold, assistant professor of molecular biology; and Mengdi Wang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering 

“Accelerating Space Exploration with AI” 
Ryne Beeson, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Bartolomeo Stellato, assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering

“AI-Assisted Algebraic Proof Systems with Engineering Applications”
Pravesh Kothari, assistant professor of computer science, and Amir Ali Ahmadi, professor of operations research and financial engineering

“AI-Accelerated Discovery of Porous Materials with Confined Electrons for Challenging Chemical Transformations”
Andrew Rosen, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Adji Bousso Dieng, assistant professor of computer science

“Aligning Memory-Augmented Large Language Models with Human Episodic Memory”
Ken Norman, Huo Professor in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience

“Article Friend: A Proposal to Develop a New, AI-Powered Tool to Increase Accessibility of Research Articles”
Deborah Levy, lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, and Anna Kasdan, American Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology Policy Fellow

“Building Biomolecular Condensates from Scratch”
Jerelle Joseph, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute

“Building Mathematical Agents for Automated Theorem Proving”
Chi Jin, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering

“Computational Dynamical Systems”
Semon Rezchikov, instructor in mathematics, in collaboration with Jordan Cotler, assistant professor of physics at Harvard University

“Creating a Dataset for Fine-Tuning LLMs for Hardware Design and Verification”
David Wentzlaff, professor of electrical and computer engineering 

“Culturally Relevant Benchmark for Languages of Africa in the Age of Large AI Models” 
Christiane Fellbaum, lecturer with rank of professor in the Council of Humanities and Program in Linguistics and senior research scholar in computer science

“Developing Foundation Models to Understand the Genetics of Human Brain Phenotypes”
Joshua Akey, professor in the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and Mona Singh, professor of computer science and the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics

“Do Brains Perceive, Act, and Plan Using Temporal Contrast?”
Benjamin Eysenbach, assistant professor of computer science, and Nathaniel Daw, professor of neuroscience and psychology

“Dynamic Generalizations in LLMs Across Decades & Development”
Adele Goldberg, Moses Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology

“Generalization and Compositionality in Natural and Artificial Minds Through the Lens of Symmetry”
Tim Buschman, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and Gautam Reddy, assistant professor of physics

“Going Big: AI-powered End-to-end Fusion Reactor Control Using All Available Diagnostics and Simulation Data”
Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering

“The Future of (Data) Work: Trust, Safety, and Alignment From Within the LLM Pipeline”
Beth Semel, assistant professor of anthropology

“HAL: Holistic Agent Leaderboard”
Arvind Narayanan, professor of computer science and director of the Center of Information Technology Policy

“Historical Censorship, Digital Corpus Creation, and AI: The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries as a Lens for Understanding LLMs and Late Imperial China”
Paul Vierthaler, assistant professor of East Asian studies

“Humanities + AI Faculty Seminar”
Meredith Martin, professor of English and director of the Digital Humanities Center

“Possibilities and Impossibilities of Social Prediction with Foundation Models and Population-scale Data”
Matthew Salganik, professor of sociology

“Reconstructing Global Oceanic Oxygen Variability with Generative Diffusion Models” 
Curtis Deutsch, professor of geosciences and the High Meadows Environmental Institute

“Spline Intelligence” 
Sigrid Adriaenssens, professor of civil and environmental engineering, in collaboration with Kazuki Hayashi, assistant professor of architectural design and structural engineering at Kyoto University

“Teaching Tools for Thought with Large Language Models”
Natalia Vélez, assistant professor of psychology

“Training a Foundation Model for Automated Analysis of Rock Samples Using Procedural Synthetic Data”
Jia Deng, associate professor of computer science, and Adam C. Maloof, professor of geosciences

“Understanding Memorization in Language Models”
Gautam Reddy, assistant professor of physics

“Unraveling Thermodynamics of Complex Electrolyte Solutions via Machine Learning”
Ryan Kingsbury, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

“When is Alignment to Ensure Non-discrimination Infeasible?”
Aleksandra Korolova, assistant professor of computer science and public affairs, and Lydia Liu, assistant professor of computer science