Donna Alberico
Stanford University students have developed a tool to help local and state governments navigate climate-resiliency funding opportunities using artificial intelligence to match these projects with varying grant opportunities.
“This is going to be one of the most transformational opportunities to put local governments in a position of knowledge and, therefore, action,” said Megan Kilgore, the Columbus, Ohio, city auditor and an advisor for Airys, as the tool is dubbed.
Airys is “revolutionizing” how state and local governments tackle resiliency by using technology to more quickly empower them to identify, manage and secure funding, she noted.
“Airys represents a paradigm shift in public finance. Because the students have … harnessed the power of AI to create, it’s essentially a finance officer in a box,” Kilgore said.
With the Trump administration taking over in Washington, there’s an uncertain future for federal grant programs and infrastructure funding, said Charles Shi, a senior studying symbolic systems and pursuing graduate studies in management science and engineering.
“So recently, we’re also thinking about how can we leverage bond networks, how can we leverage like philanthropies, to create a capital stack for some of these infrastructure projects that is optimized with AI that’s not necessarily tied just to grants,” he said.
The project sprung from a 10-week course called “Hacking for Climate and Sustainability,” where the students — Shi, Madison Fan, Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert and Shayana Venukanthan — were tasked with looking into how states and municipalities could build better infrastructure for climate resilience, Shi said.
Through the course and 200-plus interviews, they realized local governments, many of which are understaffed and where one person may wear multiple hats, can have difficulty finding and putting together infrastructure funding, he said.
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They built the prototype in class and continued to work on it, earning two grants from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and the Stanford High Impact Fund, he noted.
“We want to take whoever wants a more climate resilient community infrastructure through the whole process of first understanding their risk … and then helping them search an applicable grant for their project,” said Fan, a senior majoring in product design with a focus on planet sustainability and pursuing a master’s degree in computer science with a focus on human computer interaction.
The goal is to consolidate the information into a “one-stop shop” for available data — which usually requires users to toggle between different databases and navigate through various sources — and make that data actionable by showing the top risks the user faces, she said.
The site, through AI, will also give municipalities and states suggestions on what they can do with that risk by offering featured solutions, according to Fan.
From there, the tool, through a grant matching algorithm, will help them locate applicable grants for their project, which currently presents a similar problem to finding available data, as there are different databases for these grants and different methods to learn about them, she noted.
The team scrapes all these grants from different sources and consolidates them into one database. AI then searches for eligible grants, finds the most applicable to the project and offers a quick overview and high-level summary in a jargon-free language, she said.
“We’re feeding in information about the existing, available grants and upcoming grants … [and] hoping to build the scaffolding of networks of information zone grants,” said Kongtaveelert, a senior studying computer science and pursuing a master’s in earth systems.
The team is currently focused on improving the tool’s accuracy, so “we want to develop that in a closed environment, with post partnerships with institutions or local governments first,” he said.
The team hopes to launch Airys publicly next year or the year after, Kongtaveelert said.