print('NSF 20-503: Accelerating Research, Transforming Society, and Growing the American Workforce')Intro
AI holds the potential to transform lives through increased economic prosperity, improved educational opportunities and quality of life, and enhanced security.
At the same time, the potential capabilities and complexities of AI, combined with the wealth of interactions with human users and the environment, makes it critically important to further advance our understanding of AI, including aspects of transparency, security, and control.
Institute-scale activities enable multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder teams to focus on larger-scale, longer-time horizon challenges in both foundational and use-inspired AI research, and development of the future AI workforace, as well as and addressing some of society's grand challenges.
AI Research Institutes may serve as national nexus points for collaborative efforts spanning institutions of higher education, federal agencies, industry, and nonprofits / foundations in such areas.
They may also accelerate the transition of AI innovations into many economic sectors, and nurture and grow the next generation of talent.
A long-term, substantive, and highly visible investment in AI research, infrastructure, and workforce development will realize the potential of, and enable the U.S. to maintain global leadership in AI
Foundation and Use-Inspired AI Research
Research in foundational AI seeks to develop theory and methods that are independent of any particular domain of application.
Use-inspired AI research refers to basic research that has use for society in mind.
Use-inspired research seeks new methods and understanding in AI by situating the research in a domain of application to simulatenously inform progress in aI and solve particular use cases.
eg, Foundational research in ML gave rise to breakthroughs in DL motivated by performance in control contexts like character recognition.
'Use-inspired' instead of 'applied' to emphasize that this solicitation seeks to support work that goes beyond merely applying known techniques, and adds new knowledge and understanding in both foundational AI and use-inspired domains.
Ideally, there is a virtuous cycle between foundational and use-inspired research, where foundational results provide a starting point for use-inspired research, and the results from use-inspired research are generalized and made foundational.
AI Research Institutes Scope
It is expected that each AI Research Institute (AIRI) will pursue this vision in ways that are uniquely suited to its selected research focus, facilities, collaborations, and other unique circumstances.
Proposers are encouraged to convey the unique qualities of the proposed Institute, while addressing the following desierata common to all AI Research Institutes proposed to this program:
AIRI advance foundational AI research that will have broad and lasting impact, adding significant new knowledge and understanding to the disciplinary areas associated with the definition of AI specified above.
Institutes aimed at advancing established AI lines of research such as planning, ML, knowledge representation and reasoning, optimization, perception, NLU, and embodied agents should demonstrate the potential to radically advance these areas beyond the state of the art.
Institutes might also address new foundational AI research priorities that arise from rapid advances in AI and the increasing ubiquity of AI-enabled tech.
This might include (but not limited to) new paradigms for investigating and modeling machine intelligence, the principled integration of AI components into more robust system architectures and platforms, research of the human-technology implications of AI including human-AI collaboration and human-centered design and general ethical considerations for AI, or novel hardware and software system approaches to support AI in a variety of contexts
These lines of research should be grounded in and integrated with broader foundational theories, paradigms, and architectures for computing and communication.
Whatever its foundational AI research focus, the Institute must address areas in clear need of larger efforts over longer timeframes.
The new directions charted by AIRI might indeed challenge disciplinary divisions that result from the current state of specialization, or promote the establishment of new science, engineering and educational communities that better reflect the long-term research needs for future AI.
AIRI leverage use-inspired research to inform foundational research priorities, accelerate the fielding of AI-powered innovation, and meet the challenges and complexity of critical domain or application problems.
The sectors for such use-inspired research are many, and may be aligned with an area of science and engineering (eg, chemistry or materials synthesis), segment of the economy (eg, transportation or healthcare), or societal good (eg, wildlife protection or clean air and water).
Ultimately, AI tech are critical for addressing a range of long-term challenges in many areas of societal importance.
The use-inspired dimension of an AIRI's mission will promote the transfer of knowledge through the meaningful exchange of scientific and technical information with internal participants and external stakeholders such as industrial partners, public policy makers, or international orgs as well as with the broader scientific and education community.
Finally, AIRI create the potential for the creation and sharing of community infrastructure, including data and software, to further research, promote reproducibility, and support education.
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