Executive Order 13960, "Promoting the Use of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in the Federal Government," requires agencies to publish annual inventories of non-classified and non-sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) use cases.
In compliance with this executive order and further guidance provided by the Chief Information Officer Council, this page lists AI use cases that the U.S. National Science Foundation uses to advance its mission, enhance decision making or otherwise benefit the public. This list is also linked in a tabular format.
NSF has developed an AI Compliance Plan to comply with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum M24-10.
For more information, please contact NSF's chief AI official, Dorothy Aronson, at daronson@nsf.gov or (703) 292-4299.
NSF's 2023/2024 AI use case inventory
Updated July 2024
Use case ID: AII -7
Managing organization: Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO)
Stage of development: Implemented
Date implemented: 2023
Service Now Gen AI "Now Assist"
ServiceNow GenAI is a FedRAMP High certified system to accelerate digital transformation using Now Assist. Automatically generate content such as responses, work notes, and knowledgebase articles related to customer service experience. Increase productivity and speed to delivery with intelligent recommendations. Resolve issues swiftly with chatbots that understand human language.
Use case ID: AII-8
Managing organization: Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)
Stage of development: Operation and maintenance
Date implemented: 2023
Budget Area Topic Classification Tool
The Budget Area Topic Classification Tool uses a pre-trained BERT model ('bert-base-uncased') to classify proposals into 1 of 8 budget areas: Advanced Manufacturing, AI, Advanced Wireless, Clean Energy, Microelectronics & Semiconductors, Quantum, or Trustworthy AI. This approach is semi-supervised in nature as the training data is comprised of pre-tagged CISE proposals from prior years. Upon training the model to learn the multi-label structure of the underlying data, the model's accuracy and discriminatory power was tested using a hold-out sample (i.e. 80/20 split). The model outputs a numerical vector of probabilities representing the likelihood that a given proposal belongs to 1 or more categories. A cut-off value can then be set for determining final classification for a given proposal.
Use case ID: AII-9
Managing organization: Office of Legislative & Public Affairs (OLPA)
Stage of development: Operation and maintenance
Date implemented: 2023
AI Voice-Over
WellSaid has been used in our last projects to generate temporary placeholder voice over, which will be replaced later by real voice-over, so it doesn't cause many AI policy concerns. On top of the typical text-to-voice conversation, 11 Lab allows users to train their own voice-over, which sounds to have a potential to reshape our workflow, with the proper supervision and regulation.
Use case ID: AII-10
Managing organization: Office of Legislative & Public Affairs (OLPA)
Stage of development: Development
Date implemented: 2023
Adobe Photoshop
OLPA's Creative Services team will use Photoshop's AI-powered tools to refine edits of photos and graphics, particularly the retouching of portraits.
Use case ID: AII-19
Managing organization: STEM Education – Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings
Stage of development: Implemented
Date implemented: 2024
Resubmit Checker
This application takes a list of proposal IDs and returns a list of similar proposals submitted to NSF in the past, scored by their similarity. This is useful for identifying resubmitted proposals for several purposes: evaluating possible returned without reviews (RWRs) for lack of revision, ensuring continuity of merit review, and for analysis of broader resubmit trends.
Use case ID: AII-22
Managing organization: OCIO
Stage of development: Development
Date implemented: 2024
AWS Assisted Software Development
Within software development, AI-driven tools, such as AWS CodeWhisperer, Amazon Q and Bedrock, and integration with development workflow, promise to elevate developer productivity and refine code quality. The objective of this pilot is to explore potential integration of these AWS services with DIS Developers IDEs, Jenkins automation, Bitbucket, laying the groundwork for Secure AI Assisted Development at NSF.
Use case ID: AII-24
Managing organization: Technology, Innovation and Partnerships – Innovation and Technology Ecosystems – ENGINES (TIP-ITE-ENGINES)
Stage of development: Implemented
Date implemented: 2024
Mine Potential Reviewer's Area of Expertise
Airtable is a low code platform that incorporates Open AI. The Open AI services are purchased by and the data is kept private to Airtable. TIP has been approved to use Airtable for several use cases and Airtable has been certified as secure by the NSF OCIO Security Team. Requested approval to use Airtable to trial Airtable' s AI's ability to match potential reviewer expertise to the reviewer.
Use case ID: AII-25
Managing organization: TIP-ITE-ENGINES
Stage of development: Implemented
Date implemented: 2024
Finding the State
TIP is authorized to use Airtable for project management including reviewer volunteers and recruitment. Airtable is a no-code platform that includes a built-in database. They do not store any personally identifiable information (PII) in their database except for "public PII" such as name, position, work email address, areas of professional expertise, etc. The Airtable AI is an Airtable private instance of Open AI.
