Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Engineered Systems

The Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Engineered Systems (CAFE), pronounced café directed by Dr. Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, brings together expertise from 75 researchers representing 24 academic units across Penn State with the goal of developing cross-disciplinary interactions for advancing AI foundations. The center’s focus is on accelerating advances by synergistically advancing AI foundations and the techniques to deploy them efficiently toward applications focused on engineered and defense systems. CAFE provides opportunities for research partnerships, faculty/student recruitment, and technology transition to practice.

CAFE focuses on the convergence of foundational and applied AI across analytic methods and application domains in engineered systems to exploit breakthroughs at one frontier that can then be applied at others. The ability of domain experts to leverage cutting-edge AI research advances, beyond customary commercial toolbox kits, will facilitate a rapid pace of transformative breakthroughs. At the same time, the challenges unveiled by specific application problems will drive innovations in foundational AI. CAFE provides a unified forum for cross-pollinating ideas among these research groups at Penn State.