Project ProtoStar opens first challenge November 2

Project ProtoStar arrives as federal policy increasingly expects publicly funded research to be shared. Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have strengthened public-access requirements, and Hugging Face is among the ten generalist repositories listed by NIH for sharing research data. The initiative's founding partners span five universities working through the Open Forum for AI, plus the Astera Institute, Hugging Face as infrastructure partner, and the Open Research Community Accelerator through its Fostering Innovation Network. Participating organizations formalize their involvement through a memorandum of understanding supporting the release of suitable scientific datasets, models and code on open infrastructure.

The gap ProtoStar targets is not availability but usability. Scientific datasets, models and code are often scattered across incompatible systems, stored in static or legacy formats, or released without the documentation, metadata and provenance needed to understand and reuse them. Hugging Face already hosts more than 17,000 public datasets across core scientific domains, approaching 29,000 when medicine and mathematics are included, and researchers shared more than three times as many new science datasets in the first nine months of 2026 as in the same period of 2025. Documentation matters: 90% of dataset downloads on Hugging Face are from fully documented datasets.

The challenge series is designed to build an evidence base. Each challenge is hosted by a participating institution around resources it has released openly, with two goals: demonstrate scientific reuse and learn what makes reuse possible. The first, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University from November 2–13, 2026, asks teams to forecast four urban climate indicators for 210 U.S. cities using records through 2018 and to propose a short climate adaptation policy idea. Forecasting performance will be assessed on a public leaderboard against simple statistical baselines, and final results will be published in early 2027 once complete 2026 weather records are available. Future challenges will be announced through the Project ProtoStar page on Hugging Face.