Ai Magazine最新文献

The EngageAI Institute focuses on AI-driven narrative-centered learning environments that create engaging story-based problem-solving experiences to support collaborative learning. The institute's research has three complementary strands. First, the institute creates narrative-centered learning environments that generate interactive story-based problem scenarios to elicit rich communication, encourage coordination, and spark collaborative creativity. Second, the institute creates virtual embodied conversational agent technologies with multiple modalities for communication (speech, facial expression, gesture, gaze, and posture) to support student learning. Embodied conversational agents are driven by advances in natural language understanding, natural language generation, and computer vision. Third, the institute is creating an innovative multimodal learning analytics framework that analyzes parallel streams of multimodal data derived from students’ conversations, gaze, facial expressions, gesture, and posture as they interact with each other, with teachers, and with embodied conversational agents. Woven throughout the institute's activities is a strong focus on ethics, with an emphasis on creating AI-augmented learning that is deeply informed by considerations of fairness, accountability, transparency, trust, and privacy. The institute emphasizes broad participation and diverse perspectives to ensure that advances in AI-augmented learning address inequities in STEM. The institute brings together a multistate network of universities, diverse K-12 school systems, science museums, and nonprofit partners. Key to all of these endeavors is an emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We briefly introduce this special issue and describe the scheme for the organization of the 20 articles in it.

The U.S. National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes program is introduced, and its significance is discussed relative to the guiding national AI research and development strategy. The future of the program is also discussed, including, the strategic priorities guiding the potential for new AI Institutes of the future, initiatives for building a broader ecosystem to connect Institutes into a strongly interconnected network, and the building of new AI capacity and fostering partnerships in minority-serving institutions.

This article is a short introduction to AI4OPT, the NSF AI Institute for Advances in Optimization. AI4OPT fuses AI and optimization, inspired by societal challenges in supply chains, energy systems, chip design and manufacturing, and sustainable food systems. By combining machine learning and mathematical optimization, AI4OPT strives to develop AI-assisted optimization systems that bring orders of magnitude improvements in efficiency, perform accurate uncertainty quantification, and address challenges in resiliency and sustainability. AI4OPT also applies its “teaching the teachers” philosophy to provide longitudinal educational pathways in AI for engineering.

This paper highlights the overall endeavors of the NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence (AI-EDGE) to create a research, education, knowledge transfer, and workforce development environment for developing technological leadership in next-generation edge networks (6G and beyond) and artificial intelligence (AI). The research objectives of AI-EDGE are twofold: “AI for Networks” and “Networks for AI.” The former develops new foundational AI techniques to revolutionize technologies for next-generation edge networks, while the latter develops advanced networking techniques to enhance distributed and interconnected AI capabilities at edge devices. These research investigations are conducted across eight symbiotic thrust areas that work together to address the main challenges towards those goals. Such a synergistic approach ensures a virtuous research cycle so that advances in one area will accelerate advances in the other, thereby paving the way for a new generation of networks that are not only intelligent but also efficient, secure, self-healing, and capable of solving large-scale distributed AI challenges. This paper also outlines the institute's endeavors in education and workforce development, as well as broadening participation and enforcing collaboration.

Current AI systems still fail to match the flexibility, robustness, and generalizability of human intelligence: how even a young child can manipulate objects to achieve goals of their own invention or in cooperation, or can learn the essentials of a complex new task within minutes. We need AI with such embodied intelligence: transforming raw sensory inputs to rapidly build a rich understanding of the world for seeing, finding, and constructing things, achieving goals, and communicating with others. This problem of physical scene understanding is challenging because it requires a holistic interpretation of scenes, objects, and humans, including their geometry, physics, functionality, semantics, and modes of interaction, building upon studies across vision, learning, graphics, robotics, and AI. My research aims to address this problem by integrating bottom-up recognition models, deep networks, and inference algorithms with top-down structured graphical models, simulation engines, and probabilistic programs.

AIIRA seeks to transform agriculture by creating a new AI-driven framework for modeling plants at various agronomically relevant scales. We accomplish this by designing and deploying AI-driven predictive models that fuse diverse data with siloed domain knowledge. AIIRA's vision, illustrated in Figure 1, consists of four technical thrusts with cross-cutting education, training, and outreach activities. Our activities are focused on theory, algorithms, and tools for the principled creation of goal-oriented AI tools deployed at plant and field scales. Our use-inspired AI developments are tightly integrated with USDA-relevant challenges in crop improvement and sustainable crop production. Our strong social science focus ensures sustained AI adoption across the ag value chain. Our cyberinfrastructure (CI) efforts ensure cohesive, sustainable, and extensible CI to reproducibly share and manage data assets and analysis workflows to a diverse spectrum of the Ag community. Taken together, this will ensure long-term payoffs in AI and agriculture. AIIRA has established a new field of Cyber Agricultural Systems at the intersection of plant science, agronomics, and AI. Our signature activities build the workforce for this new field through formal and informal educational activities. Through these activities, AIIRA  creates accessible pathways for underrepresented groups, especially Native Americans and women.

Meeting today's major scientific and societal challenges requires understanding dynamics of prosociality in complex adaptive systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) is intimately connected with these challenges, both as an application domain and as a source of new computational techniques: On the one hand, AI suggests new algorithmic recommendations and interaction paradigms, offering novel possibilities to engineer cooperation and alleviate conflict in multiagent (hybrid) systems; on the other hand, new learning algorithms provide improved techniques to simulate sophisticated agents and increasingly realistic environments. In various settings, prosocial actions are socially desirable yet individually costly, thereby introducing a social dilemma of cooperation. How can AI enable cooperation in such domains? How to understand long-term dynamics in adaptive populations subject to such cooperation dilemmas? How to design cooperation incentives in multiagent learning systems? These are questions that I have been exploring and that I discussed during the New Faculty Highlights program at AAAI 2023. This paper summarizes and extends that talk.

This article presents key insights from the New Faculty Highlights talk given at AAAI 2023, focusing on the crucial role of fidelity simulators in the safety evaluation of learning-enabled components (LECs) within safety-critical systems. With the rising integration of LECs in safety-critical systems, the imperative for rigorous safety and reliability verification has intensified. Safety assurance goes beyond mere compliance, forming a foundational element in the deployment of LECs to reduce risks and ensure robust operation. In this evolving field, simulations have become an indispensable tool, and fidelity's role as a critical parameter is increasingly recognized. By employing multifidelity simulations that balance the needs for accuracy and computational efficiency, new paths toward comprehensive safety validation are emerging. This article delves into our recent research, emphasizing the role of simulation fidelity in the validation of LECs in safety-critical systems.

We are living through a revolutionary moment in AI history. Users from diverse walks of life are adopting and using AI systems for their everyday use cases at a pace that has never been seen before. However, with this proliferation, there is also a growing recognition that many of the central open problems within AI are connected to how the user interacts with these systems. To name two prominent examples, consider the problems of explainability and value alignment. Each problem has received considerable attention within the wider AI community, and much promising progress has been made in addressing each of these individual problems. However, each of these problems tends to be studied in isolation, using very different theoretical frameworks, while a closer look at each easily reveals striking similarities between the two problems. In this article, I wish to discuss the framework of human-aware AI (HAAI) that aims to provide a unified formal framework to understand and evaluate human–AI interaction. We will see how this framework can be used to both understand explainability and value alignment and how the framework also lays out potential novel avenues to address these problems.