A $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation will create the Taylor Geospatial Institute Regional AI Learning System. Launched in April 2022 and led by Saint Louis University, the Taylor Geospatial Institute brings together eight Midwestern universities and research centers to harness innovation in geospatial science.
The three-year grant, “Regional Computing: Taylor Geospatial Institute Regional AI Learning System,” was awarded to William TC Kramer, Illinois CS research professor and executive director of the New Frontiers Initiative at UIUC; Shaowen Wang, professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science and founding director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at UIUC; and Vasit Sagan, associate professor of geospatial science at Saint Louis University and acting director of TGI.
The high-performance computing and data analysis system, known as TGI RAILS, will be housed at the National Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“Illinois has a 30,000 square-foot facility that is uniquely set up to securely house this computing equipment and make it easily available to TGI researchers and educators,” Kramer said. “It made sense to house it here. This system will deliver gold-star research computing for TGI’s member institutions.”