Tech · Hugging Face
Announcing Project ProtoStar: Making Publicly Funded Science AI-Ready
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An initiative bringing together universities, research organizations, industry, and the open science community to make publicly funded research easier to discover, reuse, and build upon.
Key facts
- The 18 public repositories maintained by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) on Hugging Face have collectively received more than 11 million downloads, while NASA IMPACT's 27
- Hosted by Carnegie Mellon University | November 2–13, 2026
- New public science datasets on Hugging Face per quarter, by domain (Q1 2023–Q3 2026)
- It builds on efforts such as the National Cancer Institute's AI Data-Readiness Challenge and Hugging Face's guide to preparing public-sector data for AI
Summary
The initiative's founding partners include Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and The George Washington University, all working through the Open Forum for AI (OFAI) as the university coalition partner; the Astera Institute; Hugging Face as the infrastructure partner; and the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), through its Fostering Innovation Network, as the community partner. Participating organizations formalize their involvement through a memorandum of understanding supporting the release of suitable scientific datasets, models, and code in AI-ready formats on open infrastructure. The U.S. federal government invests approximately $190 billion annually in research and development, and federal policy increasingly expects the results to be shared publicly. But making research publicly available does not automatically make it usable.