October 2026 • Event
NSDF Summit on Federated Autonomous Science
If you want to attend the NSDF Summit, please register on the PACT website Here
Overview
Research facilities in advanced manufacturing, materials science, energy, medicine, and other fields generate vast, heterogeneous, and often sensitive data. Much of this data must remain close to the instruments and facilities where it is produced. At the same time, scientific discovery increasingly depends on connecting data, computing resources, artificial intelligence, and expertise across institutions.
The NSDF Summit on Federated Autonomous Science will bring together leaders from academia, industry, national laboratories, research facilities, and cyberinfrastructure organizations to examine how federated data architectures and autonomous AI can support collaborative science while respecting security, data sovereignty, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
The Summit is a working meeting. Participants will compare requirements across scientific domains, identify common technical and organizational barriers, and define opportunities for shared infrastructure and collaborative pilot projects.
Four Core Discussion Areas
- Materials science and manufacturing: The discussion will examine AI-guided experiments, autonomous facilities, materials design, data fusion, and the integration of experimental and computational data across distributed facilities.
- Energy and power systems: Participants will consider trustworthy autonomous control, including nuclear systems, and the data, computing, validation, and security requirements needed to support AI-assisted operation.
- Health and medicine: The discussion will address clinical AI, multiomic data, surgical intelligence, privacy-sensitive collaboration, community standards, and methods for learning across distributed data repositories.
- Cross-cutting foundations: The Summit will identify requirements shared across the three scientific areas, including federated data access, AI-ready metadata, provenance, reproducibility, semantics, workflow portability, networking, cybersecurity, governance, and policy.
Who should attend
The Summit welcomes research facility operators, scientific application teams, data and AI researchers, cyberinfrastructure developers, network providers, standards organizations, industry partners, program leaders, and policy experts. The program is designed for participants who want to help define practical requirements and contribute to future collaborations.
Expected outcomes
The discussions will inform a public post-Summit brief that documents shared requirements, research and infrastructure gaps, partnership opportunities, candidate pilot projects, and priorities for coordinated investment. Participants will also have opportunities to identify collaborators and propose concrete next steps.
Registration and participation
Registration is available through the PACT 2026 registration site. Select the tutorials and workshops option for Monday, October 19, to register for the NSDF Summit.
Position papers submitted by September 15 receive priority consideration for the program. Additional position papers are accepted through September 30, 2026. Submissions may describe a scientific use case, infrastructure capability, open challenge, collaboration opportunity, or proposed pilot.
Program
All times are Central Time. The program combines invited talks, concise position statements, moderated panels, pilot pitches, and structured discussion.
| NSDF Summit on Federated Autonomous Science — Speaker Program | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday, October 19th, 2026 - Discovery Partners Institute, 200 S Wacker, Chicago, IL 60606 4th floor | ||||
| Summit 9:00 AM-5:00 PM - Welcome Reception 5:00-6:00 PM | ||||
| Time | Format | Session | Participants & Contributions | Length |
| 9:00 AM – 9:15 AM | Welcome | Welcome: The Collaboration Challenge | Michela Taufer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Valerio Pascucci, University of Utah |
15 min |
| 9:15 AM – 10:00 AM | Short Talks | Foundations for Federated Autonomous Science | Chair: TBA | Total: 45 min |
| Talk | Materials Science: Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design PCL Node AIMD-Net | Todd Hufnagel, Johns Hopkins University | 15 min | |
| Talk | Energy: Trustworthy Autonomous Control of Nuclear Reactors Through Federated Science. | Vince Wang, Utah Nuclear Engineering Program... | 15 min | |
| Talk | Health/medical: The Need for Community Standards | Mark A. Musen, Stanford University | 15 min | |
| 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM | Break | Morning Break | 30 min | |
| 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Talks & Discussion | Science Domains and Trustworthy Autonomy | Moderator: Mike Papka, Argonne National Laboratory; University of Illinois Chicago | Total: 90 min |
| Talk | Internet2 and the Future of Federated Autonomous Science | David Hart, Internet2 | 10 min | |
| Talk | Quantum Mechanics-Based Multitensor AI/ML Uniquely Able to Discover, Validate and Interpret Predictors of Patient Outcomes and Drug Targets from Small-Cohort, Noisy and High-Dimensional Multiomic Data | Orly Alter, University of Utah and Prism AI Therapeutics | 10 min | |
| Talk | Challenges for Distributed Digital Infrastructure at LLNL | Timo Bremer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of Utah | 10 min | |
| Talk | Trust but Verify: Secure and Trustworthy AI in Science | Anita Nikolich, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | 10 min | |
| Talk | FedReady: Bounded Agents for Federation Formation | Ziyue Xu, NVIDIA | 10 min | |
| Talk | Computing Infrastructure for Clinical AI — Needs and Challenges | Rudolph Pienaar, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School | 10 min | |
| Talk | Introducing AURORA: A Utah Programmable Cloud Laboratory (PCL) Node for Quantum Materials and Beyond | Mike Kirby, University of Utah | 10 min | |
| Discussion | Moderated discussion with the session speakers | Cross-Domain Discussion | 20 min | |
| 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM | Lunch | Lunch and Group Photo | 90 min | |
| 1:30 PM – 2:15 PM | Position Statements & Panel | Cross-Cutting Perspectives: Data, AI, and Federation | Moderator: Carol Song, Purdue University | Total: 45 min |
| Position Statement | Knowledge Representation & Semantics in AI Science | Cogan Shimizu, Wright State University | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | AI-Driven Autonomous Data Factories for Scientific Applications | Russell Schwartz, DARPA Biological Technologies Office and Carnegie Mellon University | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Federating Research Infrastructure for Portable, Flexible Scientific Workflows | Jelena Mirkovic, USC Information Sciences Institute | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Learning from Private Data Repositories | Vipin Chaudhary, Case Western Reserve University | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Federated Surgical Intelligence: Toward a Distributed Measurement Infrastructure for Surgery | Neeraj Mainkar, Surgical Data Science Collective | 5 min | |
| Panel | Moderated panel: shared capabilities, domain constraints, NSDF opportunities, and gaps | Moderated panel | 20 min | |
| 2:15 PM – 3:00 PM | Position Statements & Panel | Shared Requirements for Federated Autonomous Science | Moderator: Virginia Trueheart, TACC | Total: 45 min |
| Position Statement | Reproducibility, repeatability, and trustworthiness in scientific discovery. | Tanu Malik, University of Missouri | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Dissolving the Data/Compute Boundary — in Both Directions, at Runtime | Steven Frank, sophic-compute.com | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | FAIR4AI-Bio: AI-Ready Data Infrastructure for Ecology and Biodiversity / NEON | Eric Sokol, National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Battelle | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | The Need for Effective Data Fusion Methods in Materials Manufacturing | Yaroslava Yingling, North Carolina State University | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | AI-BIOME: The AI-Enabled Bio-Inspired Materials Ecosystem | Ronald Koder | 5 min | |
| Panel | Moderated panel: shared capabilities, domain constraints, NSDF opportunities, and gaps | Moderated panel | 20 min | |
| 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM | Break | Afternoon Break | 30 min | |
| 3:30 PM – 4:10 PM | Pilot Pitches & Discussion | From Position Papers to Collaborative Pilots | Moderator: Timo Bremer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of Utah | Total: 40 min |
| Pilot pitch | Real-Time Experiment Steering in 3D Biological Microscopy | Claire Robertson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | 5 min | |
| Pilot pitch | Applications of ML in Life STEM | Widodo Samyono, Jarvis Christian University | 5 min | |
| Pilot pitch | In-Space Manufacturing | Sidharth Kumar, University of Illinois Chicago | 5 min | |
| Pilot pitch | From Browser to DGX: Federated AI and Computing for Interactive Science | Daniel Haehn, University of Massachusetts Boston | 5 min | |
| Pilot pitch | From Explainable to Informative AI: Understanding the World, Not Just the Model | Dean Hougen, University of Oklahoma | 5 min | |
| Response/Matching | Moderated discussion, partner matching, and identification of next steps | Discussion, responses, sign-up, and missing-partner identification | 15 min | |
| 4:10 PM – 4:50 PM | Position Statements & Panel | Shared Agenda for NSDF and Federal Agencies and Labs | Moderator: David Elbert, Johns Hopkins University | Total: 40 min |
| Position Statement | Academy: A Federated Platform for Scientific AI Agents | Kyle Chard, University of Chicago | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Autonomous Science at Interconnected User Facilities | Chris Fancher, ORNL | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Autonomous Science at NLR | Kristi Potter, National Laboratory of the Rockies | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | Integrating AI-Ready Computational and Experimental Data for Materials Science | Maria Chan, Argonne National Laboratory | 5 min | |
| Position Statement | AI Readiness and the User Facilities: Autonomy, Metadata, and Agentic AI at the NCNR User Facility | William Ratcliff, NIST Center for Neutron Research | 5 min | |
| Panel | Moderated panel: shared gaps, community actions, and priorities for coordinated investment | Moderated panel | 15 min | |
| 4:50 PM – 5:00 PM | Closing | Commitments and Close | Michela Taufer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Valerio Pascucci, University of Utah |
10 min |
| 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM | Reception | Welcome Reception | 60 min | |
| Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 - Discovery Partners Institute, 200 S Wacker, Chicago, IL 60606 4th floor | ||||
| Summit 9:00 AM–10:30 AM - Join Keynote NSDF & PACT2026 | ||||
| Time | Format | Session | Participants & Contributions | Length |
| 9:00 AM – 9:30 AM | Welcome | PACT 2026 Welcome | Michela Taufer, Jaejin Lee, and Lawrence Rauchwerger | 30 min |
| 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM | Keynote | UpDown: A Supercomputer co-designed for Graph Computing and Data Transformation | Andrew A Chien Univ of Chicago, Argonne National Lab, and Chicago UpDown Computing, Inc. | 60 min |
Organizers
| Organizer | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Michela Taufer | University of Tenneessee, Knoxville |
| Valerio Pascucci | University of Utah |
Contacts
| Michela Taufer | University of Tennessee, Knoxville | mtaufer@utk.edu |
| Valerio Pascucci | University of Utah | pascucci.valerio@gmail.com |
About NSDF
The National Science Data Fabric develops a distributed data and computing environment that helps researchers discover, access, share, and analyze scientific data across institutions and domains. NSDF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award 2609465.
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