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2404109

Cooperative Agreement

Overview

Grant Description
Apto: Collaborative Research: Global Observatory and Virtual Laboratory for Science and Technology Advance -Over the past half-century, the global geopolitical balance of scientific, technological, and economic leadership has shifted, with China?s meteoric rise and the ascendancy of new powers including Korea and India.
Technological leadership requires driving advances and setting standards that catalyze the future of global productivity.
To understand pathways that enhance U.S. competitiveness in critical technology capacity, production, and use, this project will create a global observatory and virtual laboratory for U.S. science and technology in the context of global advancement.

It will produce data sets and technology outcome models that capture the complex and emergent interdependencies among technologies; the funders, resources, researchers, and universities that catalyze and invent them; the workforces and organizations that produce them; and the markets that consume them.
Drawing upon the power of deep neural network ?Transformer? architectures, the project will then build a deep-learned, chronologically trained, large language model (LLM) to function as a data-driven ?digital double? of the global techno-scientific system.
The LLM will embed research artifacts (e.g., articles, patents, products, related news, and their rich meta-data) in a high-dimensional space, mapping them to quantitative metrics of technology capability, production, and use.

The project team will fine-tune our LLMS to capture changes in key metrics as corresponding trajectories within embedding space, and thus enable them to function as 1) a global observatory for technology catalysis, capacity, production, and use; and 2) a virtual laboratory for simulated experiments that can guide 3) causal estimation of relationships among policy levers (funding, competition, immigration), technology performance, and global leadership.
They will also tune the LLMS and related models to enable customized extraction, structuring, and disambiguation of data on research, products, funding, and policy from novel sources to enrich modeled observations and predictions, which will enable the continuous incorporation of additional data and extraction of insight.
Finally, they will use the models as resources for scientists and policymakers by building dashboards to provide funding agencies, policymakers, and researchers with the situational awareness required to improve the quality and diversification of their technology development portfolios.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
- Subawards are planned for this award.
Funding Goals
THE GOAL OF THIS FUNDING OPPORTUNITY, "ASSESSING AND PREDICTING TECHNOLOGY OUTCOMES", IS IDENTIFIED IN THE LINK: HTTPS://WWW.NSF.GOV/PUBLICATIONS/PUB_SUMM.JSP?ODS_KEY=NSF23600
Awarding / Funding Agency
Place of Performance
Chicago, Illinois 60637-5418 United States
Geographic Scope
Single Zip Code
Analysis Notes
Amendment Since initial award the total obligations have increased 100% from $3,998,231 to $8,004,743.
University Of Chicago was awarded Global Tech Observatory & Lab for US Competitiveness Cooperative Agreement 2404109 worth $8,004,743 from National Science Foundation in July 2024 with work to be completed primarily in Chicago Illinois United States. The grant has a duration of 5 years and was awarded through assistance program 47.084 NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships. The Cooperative Agreement was awarded through grant opportunity Assessing and Predicting Technology Outcomes.

Status
(Ongoing)

Last Modified 8/12/25

Period of Performance
7/1/24
Start Date
6/30/29
End Date
28.0% Complete

Funding Split
$8.0M
Federal Obligation
$0.0
Non-Federal Obligation
$8.0M
Total Obligated
100.0% Federal Funding
0.0% Non-Federal Funding

Activity Timeline

Interactive chart of timeline of amendments to 2404109

Transaction History

Modifications to 2404109

Additional Detail

Award ID FAIN
2404109
SAI Number
None
Award ID URI
SAI EXEMPT
Awardee Classifications
Private Institution Of Higher Education
Awarding Office
491501 TECHNOLOGY FRONTIERS
Funding Office
491501 TECHNOLOGY FRONTIERS
Awardee UEI
ZUE9HKT2CLC9
Awardee CAGE
5E688
Performance District
IL-01
Senators
Richard Durbin
Tammy Duckworth
Modified: 8/12/25