NSF AI grant $4M: ARIA, an institute for trustworthy "AI assistants," starting from mental health (Brown)

The NSF awarded about $4,000,000 to the AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA), led by Brown University (NSF Award 2433429; program: AI Research Institutes / NSF-Capital One partnership; October 2025 – September 2030).

Per the abstract, ARIA accelerates the development of next-generation AI assistants for mental and behavioral health — a field where trust, empathy, and personalization are critical and where current AI systems fall short. Its distinctive stance is to treat human cognition and machine cognition as inherently complementary scientific endeavors. It brings together researchers in computer science, neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy, law, and education with mental-health practitioners and civil-society groups, advancing technology while improving human well-being. It grows a future-ready workforce through interdisciplinary education from K-12 through postgraduate training.

ARIA's research centers on three interconnected pillars. (1) Grounding: new models for efficient learning and generalization, learning algorithms yielding rich causal models, and new evaluation metrics for trustworthy AI assistants. (2) Instructability: new paradigms for establishing trust in AI, theories and models of how humans interact with AI, and methods for describing AI's internal processing. (3) Alignment: advancing human-centered design, precisely defining what it means to be aligned, and developing metrics of alignment in complex ethical and social contexts. Throughout, it promotes integration between academia and industry and between research and continuing education.