MITRE has joined Carnegie Mellon University’s new artificial intelligence-focused multidisciplinary research coalition.
Funded by a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the AI Institute for Societal Decision Making aims to boost responses to a variety of societal concerns using human-centric AI technologies, MITRE announced from its McLean, Virginia headquarters on Thursday.
“We believe in the potential for AI to help us tackle hard problems from new drug discovery, to climate change mitigation, to national security challenges,” said Douglas Robbins, vice president of engineering and prototyping at MITRE.
He said that the company has prioritized advancing AI assurance across both the public and private sectors and harnessed its knowledge of federal agency decision-making scenarios and workflows to promote government adoption of “safe, equitable and effective” AI tools.
AI-SDM is the seventh institute established under the NSF’s $140 million investment to empower collaborative research within the U.S.
“The National AI Research Institutes are a critical component of our nation’s AI innovation, infrastructure, technology, education and partnerships ecosystem. These institutes are driving discoveries that will ensure our country is at the forefront of the global AI revolution,” said Sethuraman Panchanathan, NSF director.
Technologies developed by the coalition are intended to aid responders in making critical decisions across multiple areas, including disaster management and public health. Researchers will also conduct interdisciplinary training to enhance the speed and effectiveness of response in uncertain and dynamic circumstances.
The research will consider both controllable and uncontrollable factors pertaining to AI implementation, such as ethics, risk, equity and transparency. Paul Lehner and Ozgur Eris, two MITRE researchers, will apply the institute’s research to organizational efforts to adopt AI-assisted decision-making.
“MITRE will leverage its unique vantage point as an operator of federally funded research and development centers to articulate national decision-making challenges that are aligned with the institute’s goals, catalyze actionable connections to federal agencies that are in a position to address those challenges and identify transition paths to federal government operations for lasting national impact,” said Eris.
Aarti Singh, a professor in the machine learning department at CMU’s School of Computer Science, will direct AI-SDM.
She said that the institute’s partnership with MITRE is “critical to achieving a national impact for our research and outreach efforts” due to the company’s relationships with important federal stakeholders.
“MITRE is also well positioned to develop an extensive historical and current AI use case repository that will enable the study of factors governing AI adoption and human-AI complementarity,” Singh added.
In conducting their research, the AI-SDM team, which includes participants from a number of other organizations, will work alongside public health departments, emergency management agencies, nonprofits, companies, hospitals and health clinics to improve decision-making.
