University of Chicago Wins Distinguished Laude Institute Moonshots Seed Grant
Millions of farmers around the world rely on rain for their crops, but don’t have access to accurate weather forecasts that could help them decide when to plant, when to harvest, what crops to plant, and when to use inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation.
With a seed grant from the Laude Institute’s inaugural Moonshots program, Pedram Hassanzadeh (Associate Professor of Geophysical Sciences; Director of AI for Climate Initiative), Nobel laureate Michael Kremer (University Professor in Economics and the College and the Harris School of Public Policy), Ian Foster (Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science; Distinguished Fellow & Senior Scientist, MCS Division, Argonne National Lab), and Rebecca Willett (Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows; Faculty Director of AI, Data Science Institute) are developing AI-based forecasting technology to support farmers and citizens around the world to plan agricultural decisions, public health decisions, and avoid extreme heat.
This project’s goal is to combine AI weather and climate models, data from developing countries, and metrics that are explicitly designed to reflect farmer and public health concerns to deliver forecasts that can inform their decision-making to improve public health and agriculture.
“AI is redefining what’s possible in modeling the Earth system. For example, it allows for the development of faster and cheaper weather forecasts that can be tailored to local needs, making them a game changer for developing countries on the frontlines of climate change,” says Hassanzadeh. “By bridging disciplines and moving the rapidly advancing theoretical work of AI and climate scientists beyond the lab—just two years after our team helped co-develop FourCastNet, the first pioneering global AI weather model—this project will deliver transformative tools to harness this AI-driven revolution and better prepare vulnerable communities for the climate realities they face today.”
The team is actively working on partnerships to reach hundreds of millions of additional beneficiaries. Through partnerships with the Asian Development Bank, the team has already initiated conversations with officials from four other countries in Asia. Hassanzadeh’s team also runs a training program on AI-based weather forecasting for officials from Meteorological Offices, with five countries (Bangladesh, Chile, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria) participating in 2025 and a further five (Colombia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Senegal) scheduled to participate in 2026.
For the Laude seed grant, Foster, Hassanzadeh, Kremer, and Willett are developing software systems to make the forecasting and circulation of forecasts simple and user-friendly so that other countries can incorporate their own data. The interdisciplinary team (led by Willett) will develop new benchmarks that enable easy assessments of different AI forecasts across countries using their own local data, as well as AI tools that will yield more accurate forecasts and uncertainty estimates.
“Human-centered AI weather forecasts have the potential to save lives and boost prosperity by providing accurate, actionable information to millions in developing economies,” says Willett. “We are delighted by the Laude Foundation’s support of this effort to translate state-of-the-art AI methods to massive societal benefits for the people most exposed to climate risk.”
About the Laude Moonshots Program
The Laude Institute’s Moonshots program is a research competition that asks leading AI researchers how AI should be used to solve humanity’s hardest problems. The Moonshots program received 125 proposals from 600+ researchers across 47 institutions—including Turing Award winners, Field Medalists, Nobel laureates, and researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, and Cornell. Eight teams were selected to receive $250,000 seed grants, with each team competing for $10 million to fund a three-to-five-year lab to scale the open-source system globally. The selection committee was chaired by Turing Award winner David Patterson (Laude Chair; UC Berkeley Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus; Google DeepMind Distinguished Engineer) and included Nobel laureate John Jumper (Google DeepMind Distinguished Scientist), Turing Award winner John Hennessy (Alphabet Chairman; Stanford President Emeritus), Jeff Dean (Google Chief Scientist), Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer), among others.
“Moonshots was built on a simple premise: that the most consequential AI researchers in the world should be the ones shaping how AI gets used, and that they deserve the resources to think at the largest possible scale,” Patterson said. “What came back from 600 researchers across 47 institutions exceeded everything we hoped for. This is what open academic research looks like when it’s allowed to be wildly ambitious.”
Laude Institute backs computer science researchers turning breakthroughs into real-world impact from early-stage ideas to open-source projects and multi-year labs. Anchored by a $100 million pledge from founder Andy Konwinski (co-creator of Apache Spark, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI), Laude’s board is chaired by Turing Award winner David Patterson and includes Jeff Dean (Google Chief Scientist) and Joelle Pineau (Cohere Chief AI Officer; McGill Professor of Computer Science).
