UCI data infrastructure award 2026-08-27 (web)
Citation
UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). “New Data Infrastructure Award Helps Scientific Communities Build Domain-specific Platforms for Collaborative Data Science and AI.” News article, August 27, 2026. https://ics.uci.edu/2026/08/27/new-data-infrastructure-award-helps-scientific-communities-build-domain-specific-platforms-for-collaborative-data-science-and-ai/. The article says UC Irvine News published it first. Read 2026-11-09.
Bottom line
- Researchers at UC Irvine, UCLA and the University of Michigan received “nearly $9 million” from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for an award called NSF BRIDGE. The NSF Integrated Data Systems and Services (IDSS) program funds it.
- NSF BRIDGE helps scientific communities deploy data platforms built on Texera, an open-source system. The platforms can run on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or on research laboratory clusters.
Background
UC Irvine computer science professor Chen Li leads the three-year project as Principal Investigator. The co-principal investigators are Wei Wang of UCLA, and Ardalan Amiri Sani, Kristin Turney and Rui Chen of UC Irvine. Subawards go to Wei Wang and Naomi Sugie of UCLA, Steve Parker of the University of Michigan, and the UC Irvine Research Cyberinfrastructure Center (RCIC). Texera started in 2016, and the Apache Software Foundation now incubates it.
Key claims
- “Researchers at UC Irvine, UCLA, and University of Michigan have received nearly $9 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to establish a new data infrastructure capability that will help scientific communities across the nation use advanced data science and artificial intelligence tools.” (opening paragraph)
- “Built on the open-source Texera system, these platforms can run on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or on computing clusters operated by research laboratories.” (opening paragraphs)
- “They enable scientists to collaborate on data analysis and apply AI techniques without requiring advanced IT or programming skills.” (opening paragraphs)
- “NSF BRIDGE is funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Integrated Data Systems and Services (IDSS) program, which supports national research infrastructure that helps scientists use data and artificial intelligence to solve complex problems across scientific disciplines.” (A multi-disciplinary team for real-world applications)
- “The data infrastructure helps research labs and domains deploy the Texera system, provides software services, including documentation, training, and technical support.” (A multi-disciplinary team for real-world applications)
- “In addition to five domains the team already worked on, the NSF BRIDGE team is actively looking for partners that are interested in the software system and service to help their research using data science and AI techniques.” (A multi-disciplinary team for real-world applications)
Evidence and method
A university news article about a federal research award. It gives an approximate award amount, the NSF program, the three-year length and the names and roles of the team. It quotes Chen Li, Wei Wang and Steve Parker. It gives no award number and no hardware details.
Limits
The article gives the amount only as “nearly $9 million”. It does not give the NSF award number, the start date or how the amount divides among the institutions and subawards. It does not name the five domains that the team already worked on. The library has not read the linked NSF announcement or the UC Irvine News version. The article does not mention state government or CalCompute.