Asai, Fried Named 2026 AI2050 Early Career Fellows

LTI faculty members Akari Asai and Daniel Fried join Robotics Institute's Andrea Bajcsy as recipients of the Schmidt Sciences honor

Three faculty members in Carnegie Mellon University's Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science have been named 2026 AI2050 Early Career Fellows for research. Sponsored by Schmidt Sciences, AI2050 aims to make artificial intelligence safer, more useful and reliable for scientific discovery.

Akari Asai and Daniel Fried, assistant professors in the Language Technologies Institute, and Andrea Bajcsy, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute, are among 22 early career researchers selected for this year's cohort. Schmidt Sciences selected 28 researchers overall, including six senior fellows, and will provide the cohort with up to $16 million over three years to pursue their research.

The AI2050 initiative supports researchers working on opportunities and challenges that could shape how AI benefits society in the coming decades. Launched in 2022, the program focuses on a working list of hard problems in AI, including ensuring AI systems are safe and reliable and using the technology to address major scientific and societal challenges.

Akari Asai develops reliable and adaptable language systems, particularly retrieval-augmented and agentic language models.

Her fellowship-supported research will explore how AI agents can better support scientific discovery by using scientific literature, data and tools; interacting with laboratory environments; and evaluating scientific claims based on evidence.

Andrea Bajcsy works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning and AI safety.

Her fellowship-supported research addresses a growing challenge: general-purpose robot "brains" trained on massive, hidden datasets that can behave unpredictably once they're deployed. She will develop safety steering methods to guide robot behavior, helping robots interpret instructions, predict the consequences of their actions and ask for help.

David Fried's research group — Language Agents, Reasoning and Communication — works on natural language processing and the interaction between people and AI systems, with a particular focus on large language model agents.

His fellowship-supported research will explore trustworthy communication among teams of AI agents, including methods that allow agents to verify commitments, communicate based on explicit plans and make those verification processes understandable to humans.

The 2026 fellows also receive opportunities to collaborate with other AI2050 researchers and attend an annual gathering to share their work and build connections across disciplines. Fellows may receive additional funding for collaborations and computing resources.

For more information, visit the Schmidt Sciences website.