The U.S. Army has selected seven teams from academia to perform basic science research in areas including quantum physics, artificial intelligence, human agent-teaming and novel materials.
Each team will receive $1.25 million per year over a three-year base period to conduct research under the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative or MURI, the Army said Tuesday. The awards also hold options for up to two more years of work.
The Department of Defense's MURI program gathers researchers from across different disciplines to develop emerging technologies that meet the U.S. military's unique needs.
“The multidisciplinary teams are key to accelerating research progress in areas critical to future technological superiority of the Army,” said Barton Halpern, director of the Army Research Office.
MURI's newest run will support the following projects:
- Cohesive and Robust Human-Bot Cybersecurity Teams
- Emergent Topological and Hierarchical Ordered Structures
- Multi-functional Devices in Precisely Engineered Van der Waals Homojunctions
- Rethinking Reinforcement Learning with Astrocyte-Neuron Computations
- Theory and Engineering of Large-Scale Distributed Entanglement
- Tunable III-Nitride Nanostructures for N=N and C-H Bond Activation
- Understanding and Engineering Transient Mechanical Responses
These projects will be led by the following universities:
- Harvard University (two projects)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- University of Arizona
- University of California, Berkley
- University of Michigan
- University of Wisconsin