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Amazon and NSF collaborate to accelerate fairness in AI research

As we know, Artificial Intelligence is a developing technology, which currently has a variety of limitations that can cause problems.

Among them is the way they learn, which although it has improved considerably, likewise presents problems that are difficult to correct. The complicated part being the financing to fix it. Luckily there are large corporations that have the capital to cover these costs, like Amazon and the National Science Foundation.

The goal is to minimize difficulties

The goal of Amazon is to minimize biases and address the problems of transparency and accountability in AI. To that end, the Seattle company announced today that it will partner with the National Science Foundation to commit up to $ 10 million in research. That grants over the next three years to develop systems focused on impartiality in artificial intelligence and machine learning. .

“With the increasing use of AI in everyday life, impartiality in artificial intelligence is a topic of increasing importance in academia, government and industry,” wrote Prem Natarajan, vice president of natural understanding for the Alexa AI group, in a blog post “Here at Amazon, the impartiality of the machine learning systems we build to support our businesses is critical to establishing and maintaining the trust of our customers.”

Amazon’s association with the NSF will focus specifically on explanability, possible biases and adverse effects, mitigation strategies, validation of impartiality and inclusion considerations. With the objective of allowing a wider acceptance of the artificial intelligence systems and allow the United States to capitalize even more on the potential of AI technologies.

Hoping for new open source tools

The two organizations hope that the proposals, which they are accepting will result in new open source tools, publicly available data sets and publications.

Amazon will provide partial funds for the program, and the NSF will make awards determinations independently and in accordance with its merit review process. The program is expected to continue in 2020 and 2021, with additional calls for letters of intent.

“We are excited to announce this new collaboration with Amazon to fund research focused on AI’s fairness,” said Jim Kurose, NSF’s head of computer and information science and engineering. This program will support research related to the development and implementation of reliable AI systems that incorporate transparency, equity and design responsibility from the beginning.


Also published on Medium.

Published inArtificial Intelligence (AI)
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