Last Thursday, Politico held an AI Summit: Innovation and Governance as “a global leadership gathering of policymakers, business leaders and experts for solutions-driven conversations on the impact of AI on governments, industries and society.” Some notable government participants included Representative Will Hurd (Texas), France Córdova (National Science Foundation), and Stacy Dixon (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity).
In his opening remarks, Hurd said that we need to “double down on basic research.” The problem with basic research is that “often times it is hard to understand the return on investment of basic research. People believe the government should have the same returns as venture capital, private equity, but that’s just not possible. The things we fund are a stepping stone forward for the advancements.” Hurd continued with a plea, “Every 7th and 8th grader needs to get exposed to coding to help with the workforce. On the higher end, concepts like neural networks, most of that understanding is being done at the Master’s and Ph.D. level – how do we get that in the undergraduate level, how do we teach those principles and theories at an earlier point?”
Later, Denise Zheng of the Business Roundtable stated, “we need to focus on getting federal R&D spending back up.” Robert Atkinson of ITIF responded by saying that “In 1964, we outpaced everyone in R&D expenditures. You catch up by really investing. Our R&D credits haven’t gotten worse, but other countries put in much better ones. We have been so accustomed to being the winner for so long, that we think it’s the natural thing. We’ve fallen into a trap.”
France Córdova commented that “there is no finish line, we have to continue to invest to be competitive, to be among the top nations in the world. That’s the most important requirement, that we invest in R&D.” When asked if AI should be the main focus of investment, Códova responded “AI is such a big, big area and ML is mentioned a lot, but that’s only one small piece of it. So much to learn and to do in the AI space. Nobody is going to be able to do all of the facets. The importance of an R&D framework is to have a generalizable need.”
Interestingly enough, The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO) put out a request “for input from all interested parties on the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan.” Through this Request for Information (RFI), NITRD NCO seeks input from the public, including those directly performing AI R&D and directly affected by such R&D, on whether the strategic plan should be revised and, if so, the ways in which it may be improved. This includes suggestions as to the addition, removal, or modification of strategic aims, comments as to existing strategic aims as well as their past or future implementation by the Federal government. “The public input provided in response to this RFI will inform NITRD NCO and the Select Committee in updating the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan.”
Interested persons are invited to submit comments on or before 11:59 p.m. (ET) on October 26, 2018. For more information, please see this website.
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently announced a new initiative to create a Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence by the research community, led by Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California and President-Elect of AAAI) and Bart Selman (Cornell University). The plan is to hold a series of workshops in the Fall/Winter of 2018/2019, which will result in a Roadmap to be produced in the Spring of 2019. The goal of the initiative is to identify challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls, and create a compelling report that will effectively inform future federal priorities. For more information, please see this website.
