Artificial Intelligence Research Given New Funding Kickstart

 Artificial Intelligence  

The US National Science Foundation has recently announced major funding for a new center to better understand human intelligence, build smarter machines. The Center for Brains, Minds and Machines looks to use an interdisciplinary approach to achieve dramatic new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

Artifical intelligence systems like IBM's Watson and Nuance's Siri may seem quite human-like depending on the situations, however to build truly smart, world-changing machines, researchers must understand how human intelligence emerges from neurological activity.

Such a monumental goal requires that scientists and engineers across key fields work together to learn how the brain performs complex computations, from social interactions to visual recognition. The hope is that through building intelligent machines, we can better understand ourselves.

According to Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor of Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, "These recent achievements have, ironically, underscored the limitations of computer science and artificial intelligence. We do not yet understand how the brain gives rise to intelligence, nor do we know how to build machines that are as broadly intelligent as we are."
To help encourage progress in this field, the American National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded $25 million to establish a Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The center is one of three new research centers funded this year through NSF's Sciene and Technology Centers: Integrative Partnerships program.

According the the new center's website,

Our Vision is to develop a deep understanding of intelligence, and the ability to engineer it; to train the next generation of scientists and engineers in an emerging new field - the Science and Engineering of Intelligence; to catalyze continuing progress in and cross-fertilization between computer �science, math and statistics, robotics, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

The MIT-based center will also play a key role in the new BRAIN Initiative, an effort by federal agencies and private partners to support and coordinate research to understand how the brain works. It will be headed by Poggio.

Recent advances in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to neurotechnology present new opportunities for an integrated effort to produce major breakthroughs in fundamental knowledge. For example, some digital computers can now rival the raw processing power and memory of the human brain. New tools allow researchers to switch individual brain cells "on" and "off" to affect behavior. Yet, a three-year-old child can identify a door knob better than an intelligent machine can. Significant obstacles clearly remain before the gap between brain and machine can be bridged.

"Understanding the brain is one of the grand scientific challenges at the intersection of the physical, life, behavioral and engineering sciences," said John Wingfield, assistant director of NSF's Biological Sciences Directorate. "Despite major research and technological advances achieved in recent decades, a comprehensive understanding of the brain--how thoughts, memories and intelligent behavior emerge from dynamic brain activity--remains unexplained."

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Human intelligence has many aspects--including an ability to understand people and surroundings by using vision and language--so the researchers will take a multi-faceted approach. Recent work in artificial intelligence has focused in part on improvements in modeling human vision and social interaction, producing self-driving cars and the verbally quick Watson, for example.

Work at the new MIT center will cross disciplines to build more human-like machines, with the goal of establishing a theory of intelligence.

The five-year award will enable the center's researchers to benefit from the expertise of neuroscientists, engineers, mathematicians and computational scientists through a global network of academic, industrial and technological partnerships. Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor at the Department of Brain Sciences at MIT, is the principal investigator for the project.

Of the 20 faculty members currently affiliated with the center, 10 are from MIT, five are from Harvard University, and the rest are from Cornell University, Rockefeller University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University and the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The center’s international partners are the Italian Institute of Technology; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; City University of Hong Kong; the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India; and Israel’s Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University.

The CBMM's industrial partners are Google, Microsoft, IBM, Mobileye, Orcam, Boston Dynamics, Willow Garage, Deep Minds and Rethink Robotics. Also affiliated with center are Howard University; Hunter College; Universidad Central del Caribe, Puerto Rico; the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; and Wellesley College.

CBMM aims to foster collaboration not just between institutions but also across disciplinary boundaries. Graduate students and postdocs funded through the center will have joint advisors, preferably drawn from different research areas.

SOURCE  National Science Foundation, Top Image Christine Daniloff/MIT

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