In August 2019 the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), released A 20-Year Community Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Research in the US. The Roadmap is the output of a series of three workshops that were held in late 2018 and early 2019, with the goal of identifying challenges and opportunities to effectively inform future federal priorities, including future AI R&D Investments. The CCC and AAAI shared the roadmap findings during the Artificial Intelligence Research: A Community Roadmap scientific session at the 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, which took place in Seattle, Washington in February, 2020. The session was moderated […]

In Tuesday’s opening lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), Joseph Sifakis, 2007 Turing Award winner, discussed whether we can trust autonomous systems and considered the interplay between the trustworthiness of the system – the system’s ability to behave as expected despite mishaps – and the criticality of the task – the severity of the impact an error will have on the fulfillment of a task. Sifakis defined autonomy as the combination of five complementary functions – perception, reflection, goal management, planning, and self-awareness/adaption. The better a given system can manage these functions the higher the level of autonomy we say that it has, from 0 (no automation) to 5 (full automation, no […]

In May, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the research community to generate white papers to help guide strategic thinking in autonomous systems in a number of different domain specific areas, including Aerial Earth Science, Construction, Defense, Disaster Management, Healthcare, Paths Towards Autonomy, Service Robots, and Transportation Systems. The CCC has released eight white papers. The Toward a Science of Autonomy for Physical Systems white paper frames both the opportunities and challenges posed by autonomous physical systems in general. We contend that, in most cases, the potential human and economic toll of not exploring and understanding automation science in a timely and thoughtful manner far outweighs the costs or risks. The associated […]