Announcing Project ProtoStar: Making Publicly Funded Science AI-Ready
Hugging Face launches Project ProtoStar to convert publicly funded research into AI-ready formats, starting with an open challenge hosted by Carnegie Mellon University on November 2.
Project ProtoStar is a cross-sector initiative led by Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and The George Washington University, alongside the Astera Institute, Hugging Face, and the Open Research Community Accelerator. The coalition will support the release of datasets, models, and code in machine-actionable formats to enhance discoverability and reuse, particularly for AI-driven research. Participating organizations formalize involvement through a memorandum of understanding and can join by contacting protostar@orcaopen.org.
The initiative responds to federal requirements for public access to research funded by agencies such as the NIH and NSF, which invest approximately $190 billion annually in R&D. Despite existing public-access policies, many scientific artifacts remain difficult to reuse due to incompatible formats, lack of documentation, or missing metadata. Project ProtoStar aims to bridge this gap by providing guidance and infrastructure to make research outputs AI-ready and practically reusable across disciplines.
The inaugural challenge, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University and opening on November 2, invites participants to use historical weather data from 210 U.S. cities to improve predictions of urban climate conditions. Teams will forecast four climate indicators and propose a climate adaptation policy, with performance evaluated against statistical baselines and published on a public leaderboard. Final results are expected in early 2027.
Hugging Face reports over 17,000 public science datasets and a comparable number of scientific models hosted on its platform, with growth accelerating in 2026. Institutions like the NIH and NASA have seen significant engagement with their repositories, demonstrating the demand for reusable scientific resources. Project ProtoStar seeks to expand this ecosystem by encouraging systematic sharing and reuse of publicly funded research through institutional policies and open challenges.