In a recent press release, GW Media Relations announced that The George Washington University is a founding partner in Project ProtoStar, a national effort with Hugging Face and other research institutions and universities to accelerate scientific discovery. GW’s participation is led by its Open Source Program Office, where GW Engineering Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Lorena Barba serves as faculty director.
With the goal of making publicly funded datasets, models and code easier for people and AI systems to find, understand and reuse, GW joins fellow founding partners Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Purdue University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the Astera Institute. Hugging Face is the infrastructure partner; the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) is the community partner.
Here is an excerpt from the article: “Through the partnership, GW will set up a presence on Hugging Face for sharing data, code and AI models from GW research. The OSPO will help GW researchers use the platform and will bring ProtoStar’s open science challenges to the GW community. The effort complements work under way at GW Research Computing to support researchers who use open-weight models, including in privacy-sensitive research.”
Read the full press release on the GW Media Relations website, or check out Hugging Face’s official announcement for more information on the initiative.
For GW researchers and instructors who want to share their work in AI-ready formats, or use Hugging Face in their teaching, contact the GW OSPO at [email protected]. Additionally, CMU will host the inaugural ProtoStar Challenge from November 2-13; full details are available on the CMU website.