A Texas university has been selected to help secure the next generation of American science, as Washington moves to ensure that artificial intelligence systems powering its most advanced research labs can be trusted.
The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) will lead a new project under the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, a landmark national initiative described by officials as the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform.
The initiative brings together government, academia, industry and philanthropy to fuse AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced instruments to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, medicine, and national security.
UTA’s project, titled: Real-Time Trust and Resilience for AI-Driven EPICS Scientific Workflows, will be led by Dr Habeeb Olufowobi of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Why it matters
Behind the announcement is a growing, and global, vulnerability.
Many of the world’s most sensitive scientific facilities, from particle accelerators at CERN in Europe to light sources and fusion reactors in the US, UK and Japan, rely on a decades-old open-source software framework called EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System). Techparley Africa understands that the technology is the nervous system that monitors and controls billion-dollar machines.
In the last three years, these facilities have increasingly layered AI models on top of EPICS to interpret vast streams of data and make split-second control decisions in real time.
That creates a new risk that scientists say if an AI model drifts, fails, or is manipulated in a cyberattack, it could corrupt an experiment, damage equipment, or falsify results in research critical to clean energy, advanced materials and defence.
For the US, which is in a high-stakes technological race with China over AI dominance and scientific leadership, ensuring the integrity of that AI layer has become a matter of national security.
The Genesis Mission is Washington’s answer.
The UTA solution
Dr Olufowobi’s team is tasked with building what is essentially a “trust filter” for scientific AI.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming how scientific discoveries are made, but researchers must be able to trust the recommendations these systems produce,” Dr Olufowobi said. “Our goal is to develop practical technologies that help scientists confidently use AI without compromising the integrity of experiments.”
According to project documents, the team will develop a low-latency monitoring system that continuously checks AI behaviour, scores the trustworthiness of its outputs, and blocks suspicious or unreliable instructions before they reach the control system. It will include explainable risk scoring and human-in-the-loop safeguards.
The multidisciplinary effort includes collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, Washington State University and Metro State University.
“This award reflects UT Arlington’s role in solving problems of national importance,” said UTA President Jennifer Cowley, who attended the launch summit in Washington.
UTA, a Carnegie R-1 research university with over 42,700 students, is the second-largest institution in the University of Texas System.
For the Genesis Mission, success will not be measured by a single discovery, but by whether the scientists of the future can trust the AI that helps them make it.
