NSF AI grant $9M: "BRIDGE," a national center opening data science and AI to many fields (UC Irvine)

The NSF awarded about $8,998,359 to the BRIDGE National Center, led by the University of California, Irvine (NSF Award 2609582; program: Data Cyberinfrastructure; July 2026 – June 2029).

Per the abstract, BRIDGE broadens access to modern data science and AI for scientists across many research fields. Researchers in data-intensive domains — such as criminology, public health, and neurobiology — increasingly need to analyze large datasets and use advanced AI/ML, but often require additional programming expertise, computing infrastructure, or technical support. BRIDGE eliminates these barriers by providing open, supported, shareable infrastructure that lets researchers build, reuse, and collaborate on data-analysis workflows, datasets, and ML models, and by expanding access to cloud computing so a broader range of scientists can participate in data-driven discovery.

Technically, the center builds on Apache Texera (Incubating), an open-source, web-based workflow system supporting real-time collaboration, workflow sharing, and elastic access to cloud resources. BRIDGE operates and coordinates Texera-based platforms across scientific communities while providing documentation, tutorials, training, office hours, and support. Technical goals include more intuitive workflow interfaces, domain-specific AI assistants/co-pilots with privacy and safety protections, mechanisms for protecting data and workflows, automated migration of script-based analyses into reusable workflows, and seamless use of cloud resources for large-scale and GPU-intensive computation — making complex data-science and AI pipelines easier to create, run, share, and reproduce.