E-Mail ITHACA, N.Y. - Cornell University is partnering in a $36 million grant from the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) for its Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery (AMDD) collaborative university research program, which seeks to use artificial intelligence to discover new materials that could help achieve emissions-free driving. Carla Gomes, the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science, is among the lead researchers on the four-year, multi-institution grant. "AI for scientific discovery is among the most promising but challenging areas of AI," said Gomes, who is also director of Cornell's Institute for Computational Sustainability. "TRI's multidisciplinary approach enables our team to develop new AI approaches for materials discovery. We combine data-driven deep learning with knowledge-driven reasoning and optimization techniques. This approach allows us to inject scientific background knowledge into the discovery and data-analysis process."