Researchers at UC Irvine, UCLA, and the University of Michigan have received nearly $9 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to establish a new data infrastructure capability. This initiative, called NSF BRIDGE, will assist scientific communities across the nation in using advanced data science and artificial intelligence tools.
UC Irvine computer science professor Chen Li leads the award. The project aims to help scientific communities deploy computing platforms tailored to their needs. These platforms will allow researchers to share datasets, analysis pipelines, and machine learning models. Built on the open-source Texera system, the platforms can operate on public clouds like Amazon Web Services or on computing clusters managed by research laboratories.
NSF BRIDGE is designed to enable scientists to collaborate on data analysis and apply AI techniques without requiring advanced IT or programming skills. The project addresses the increasing volume of data in many scientific fields and the rapid advances in AI, seeking to transform observations into actionable knowledge by removing technical barriers.
Rather than requiring scientists to set up complex computing systems or write sophisticated scripts, NSF BRIDGE allows scientific communities to deploy Texera as an online platform. On this platform, researchers can store data, share it with collaborators, and analyze it using AI-powered tools. Researchers will complete tasks through visual dataflows and plain-language instructions to AI agents, bypassing the need to write code in languages such as Python or R.
Chen Li stated that the project aims to transform how scientific communities use data science and AI, enabling "seamless knowledge sharing and collaboration without requiring programming expertise." The three-year project builds on Texera, an open-source system for collaborative data science started in 2016 and now incubated by the Apache Software Foundation.
NSF BRIDGE is funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Integrated Data Systems and Services program. This program supports national research infrastructure for scientists using data and AI to solve complex problems. The data infrastructure helps research labs and domains deploy the Texera system, providing software services, documentation, training, and technical support.
Principal investigator Li is from the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences. Co-principal investigators from UC Irvine include Ardalan Amiri Sani from ICS, Kristin Turney from the School of Social Sciences, and Rui Chen from the School of Medicine. The Research Cyberinfrastructure Center at UC Irvine also received a subaward.
The NSF BRIDGE team is actively seeking partners interested in using the software system and service to support their research with data science and AI techniques.
