What Harvard Kempner Institute does
The Harvard Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence is a Harvard University academic research institute focused on understanding intelligence across natural (biological) and artificial (machine) systems, with the stated goal of advancing intelligence research and developing solutions to complex problems for humanity’s benefit. It is led by faculty co-directors Sham Kakade and Bernardo Sabatini, with Elise Porter serving as Executive Director. The institute emphasizes interdisciplinary work spanning machine learning, neuroscience, cognitive science, and related fields, and it supports research with a dedicated high-performance computing platform (“the Kempner AI Cluster”). The institute also runs education and training programs for students at multiple levels, including fellowships and undergraduate research opportunities, and it has an internal grant program (“Kempner Institute Accelerator Awards”) that provides access to Kempner cluster resources for Harvard faculty projects aligned with the institute’s mission.
Strategically, the Kempner Institute’s differentiator is its combination of (1) cross-disciplinary research themes centered on intelligence, (2) large-scale, dedicated academic computing infrastructure for training/testing/iterating on AI models, and (3) education programs and internal award mechanisms that route trainees and faculty into compute-enabled intelligence research across Harvard.