In early August, I-GUIDE held its Forum at the University of Illinois Chicago in conjunction with the annual Ecosystem Conference for the five NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Institutes. The gathering brought together over 100 multidisciplinary researchers interested in shaping the future of AI and data-intensive sciences. and provided an expanded platform for collaboration and networking across the HDR ecosystem.
The Forum started with a day of hands-on workshops. Topics focused on geospatial AI, cyberGIS, and data-driven science focused on I-GUIDE research projects such as aging dams. The I-GUIDE Platform, deployed during these workshop sessions, supports these types of activities. 
I-GUIDE Director Shaowen Wang launched the 2nd day of the Forum with an overview of the State of I-GUIDE. He highlighted the principles that I-GUIDE has come to espouse for the responsible use of AI, including grounding it in critical spatial thinking and democratizing access to spatial data and AI together. 
Luc Anselin, the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago, offered a perspective-inspired keynote on the trends he’s observed in spatial analytics over his career, influenced both by computing, the nature of questions being posed, and the expanded availability of data from new and novel sources. 
A Wednesday night reception and poster session provided a social opportunity to explore research accomplishments from across all areas of the HDRs.
Over the course of the week, leaders from the the other four HDR Institutes shared their highlights as well. Common themes included the gains made in discoveries with novel data sources and the challenges that convergence approaches create in reaching and sustaining connections with new academic and professional audiences.
From left to right, the other HDR Institutes were represented by leaders Shih-Chieh Hsu (University of Washington) of A3D3, Vandana Janeja (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) of iHARP, Elif Etrikin (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) of ID4, and Tanya Berger-Wolf (The Ohio State University), of Imageomics.
Along with formal presentations, the Forum and Conference were rich with discussion opportunities organized around guiding questions, such as “What should AI-era education workforce development look like for data-intensive discovery and innovation?” and “What does trustworthy AI-enabled science require in practice?” 
Three sessions were particular turning-points for the discussion overall. First, Joseph Whitmeyer, the program director from NSF currently overseeing I-GUIDE, spoke via Zoom to the audience to share the status of funding in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate, which for the upcoming 2027 fiscal year has been set to zero. Having the audience hear this at the start lay the groundwork for a later second NSF presentation, the keynote by Chaitan Baru, the Section Head for Emerging Technologies in NSF’s TIP Directorate. His message highlighted approaches that NSF may support to “rebalance” an AI-portfolio, including emphasizing that AI is not limited to generative LLM AI, to support open knowledge networks for commonsense, and the importance of human-like reasoning and learning methods. 
Finally, the final panel of the conference, hosted by Cliff Jacobs who is a member of I-GUIDE’s External Advisory Board, prompted the HDR Institute leaders to frame their next ideas based on the lessons learned and impacts achieved from the preceding five years. One area they all agreed has been a challenge is how to measure impacts from their convergence science accomplishments in ways that go beyond insufficient traditional measures, such as numbers of publications.
