Announcing Project ProtoStar: Making Publicly Funded Science AI-Ready

Project ProtoStar is a new initiative bringing together universities, industry, and the open science community to release publicly funded scientific datasets, models, and code in AI-ready, machine-actionable formats on open infrastructure. Founding partners include Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and The George Washington University through the Open Forum for AI, the Astera Institute, Hugging Face as infrastructure partner, and ORCA as community partner. The first open challenge, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University from November 2–13, 2026, asks participants to use historical weather data from 210 U.S. cities through 2018 to predict 2019–2026 climate conditions and propose a climate adaptation policy idea.