Notre Dame joins IBM, Meta in new AI Alliance
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The University of Notre Dame is joining a coalition of media companies and university partners to study artificial intelligence.
The AI Alliance, led by IBM and Meta, the parent of Facebook, seeks to support the social benefits of AI through ensuring the safety, security and trustworthiness of the technology.
“Innovations in artificial intelligence offer, at the same time, the promise of serving the common good and the threat of undermining it,” Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins said in a news release. “It is critical that we engage serious ethical questions about AI alongside the technological.”
The international coalition includes hardware and software developers and will meet in working groups to explore several topics including:
- Benchmarks, tools and resources for responsible use of AI at a global level
- Evaluation standards for open model AI and its use in applications
- A network of open foundation models to help address societal challenges like human health and climate
- A hardware accelerator ecosystem that enables software technology
- AI skills building, education and research
- Educational content to inform public discourse and policymakers
- Initiatives that encourage AI’s development in safe and beneficial ways
The following institutions will join Notre Dame as partners in the alliance: Cornell University; Dartmouth College; Imperial College London; Indian Institute of Technology Bombay; Technical University of Munich; the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society; University of Illinois; University of Tokyo; Yale University; and others.
Jeffrey F. Rhoads, who is vice president for research at Notre Dame and a professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, said in the news release that the alliance is expected to “bring an unprecedented opportunity to our faculty and our students as they help steer innovations that bring benefits to society.”
“The technologies that will truly move our world forward will be the ones that emerge from an inclusive, interdisciplinary innovation ecosystem,” Rhoads said. “As a founding partner in the AI Alliance, Notre Dame’s engineers, data scientists, ethicists and other researchers will be able to collaborate to build that ecosystem, joining both with AI labs around the world and with the industry partners who get new technologies into the hands of users.”
More information about the effort is available online at thealliance.ai.