On Friday, June 21st, the White House released an update to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan: 2019 Update. Informed by responses from a recent Request for Information, see the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) response here; the updated R&D Plan defines the eight key priority areas for Federal investments in AI R&D. The 2016 R&D Plan laid a critical foundation for U.S. R&D priorities in artificial intelligence, and this latest version refreshes those priorities for the fast-changing AI landscape.
The following eight strategic priorities are identified in the 2019 update:
Strategy 1: Make long-term investments in AI research.
Strategy 2: Develop effective methods for human-AI collaboration.
Strategy 3: Understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI.
Strategy 4: Ensure the safety and security of AI systems.
Strategy 5: Develop shared public datasets and environments for AI training and testing.
Strategy 6: Measure and evaluate AI technologies through standards and benchmarks.
Strategy 7: Better understand the national AI R&D workforce needs.
Strategy 8: Expand public-private partnerships to accelerate advances in AI.
This update also adds a public-private partnership mandate to the AI strategic plan.
“Government-university-industry R&D partnerships bring pressing, real-world challenges faced by industry to university researchers, enabling ‘use-inspired research’; leverage industry expertise to accelerate the transition of open and published research results into viable products and services in the marketplace for economic growth; and grow research and workforce capacity by linking university faculty and students with industry representatives, industry settings, and industry jobs,” it says.
Agencies will use this Plan to guide their R&D activities in AI, consistent with their agencies’ missions. The National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, is working to expand and foster partnerships that leverage resources such as expertise, data, and tools to capitalize on the full potential of AI to strengthen the U.S. economy, advance job growth and enhance national security. They have recently formed industry partnerships to address key scientific challenges in AI, such as a partnership with Amazon to support research focused on fairness in AI, with a goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. NSF is also serving as a convening force to bring together diverse stakeholders in the field, as when NSF brought together the government, industry and non-profit sectors last month to assess the current and future state of AI.
This National AI R&D Strategic Plan: 2019 Update follows the February 11, 2019 executive order from the Trump Administration to promote continued American leadership in AI.
As you may know, the CCC completed a series of three AI workshops and an AI Townhall at AAAI 2019 that was used to write a 20-year Roadmap for AI Research. A draft of the roadmap is here, with a final version out this summer. Please stay tuned to the CCC blog.
