Recognizing the growing impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the enterprise of scientific discovery, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has invested $1.5 million in support of six postdoctoral fellowships to study how AI is (re)shaping the process of conducting and evaluating science.

The fellowships are part of a transatlantic partnership between the US-based Sloan Foundation, the United Kingdom Metascience Unit, and the Canada-based Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to fund 29 early-career researchers studying the impact of AI on metascience. The Metascience & AI Fellowship program is a component of a larger effort from each organization to ensure that our understanding of the implications of AI technologies keeps pace with their technological development.

Through the program, the Sloan Foundation and its funding partners aim to catalyze a shared research agenda and signal the importance of studying the impacts of AI to the broader metascience community. Additionally, the program intends to build a cohort of researchers and research mentors with the necessary technical understanding of AI to seed scholarly insights from fields including philosophy, sociology, and economics.

The six fellows supported by the Sloan Foundation are:

Mel Andrews, Princeton University
Evaluating the Epistemic Credentials of AI in Science Evaluation

Kati Kish Bar-On, Boston University
The Shape of Intelligence: AI and the Changing Culture of Mathematical Knowledge

Gabrielle Benabdallah, University of Washington
Technologies of Reading: From Print Culture to AI-Augmented Science

Benjamin Santos Genta, New York University
AI, Similarity, and the Future of Systemic Reviews

Seyed Mohamad (Moh) Hosseinioun, Northwestern University
Funding the Future: AI Changes What Is Science, Who Does It, and How

Siyu Yao, University of Cincinnati
Understanding the AI Revolution in Science: An Integrated History, Philosophy, and Metascience Approach

For a complete list of all 29 fellows, including those supported by the UK Metascience Unit and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, visit the UK Research and Innovation website.