Announcing Project ProtoStar: Making Publicly Funded Science AI-Ready

Project ProtoStar is a new initiative to make publicly funded scientific research more accessible and reusable for AI-driven research. It brings together universities, research organizations, and industry partners like Hugging Face to release scientific datasets, models, and code in AI-ready, machine-actionable formats. This addresses the problem that scientific resources are often scattered, poorly documented, and difficult for AI systems to discover and interpret. The project will demonstrate its value through a series of open challenges, with the first one focusing on Climate Risk Intelligence. The initiative responds to a growing demand for such resources, as shown by the rapid increase in scientific datasets being shared on open platforms.