The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation today awarded $5.7 million to seven researchers in the artificial intelligence field as part of the most recent Allen Distinguished Investigator (ADI) Program grant.

The researchers, who are working on machine reading, diagram interpretation and reasoning, and spatial and temporal reasoning, hail from four universities around the globe — four of them work at the University of Washington.

“The Allen Distinguished Investigator program has become a platform for scientists and researchers to push the boundaries on the conventional and test the limits of how we think about our existence and the world as we know it,” Dune Ives, co-manager of The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, said in a statement. “We are only beginning to grasp how deep intelligence works. We hope these grants serve as a valuable catalyst for one day making artificial intelligence a reality.”

[Related: The next battleground for Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google: Artificial Intelligence]

The ADI program started in 2010 and this marks the first commitment to researchers in the artificial intelligence field. The focus on AI topics for 2014 is related to the vision of the new Allen Institute for AI, a multi-million dollar effort created by Allen and led by CEO Oren Etzioni that could have huge implications for the region’s tech industry and, more importantly, society as a whole. Etzioni, a former UW computer science professor and veteran entrepreneur, began work at the institute in September 2013.

However, the ADI Program is a distinct from the new Allen Institute for AI and is fully funded and operated by Allen’s foundation.

Here are the recipients, with descriptions from the foundation: