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With new federal funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Dr. Peter Lewis and researchers at the Trustworthy AI Lab are embarking on a new 5-year program of research to develop a new generation of socially reflective intelligent machines.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and other forms of machine intelligence are increasingly integrated into society, this new research program aims to discover how to build more socially sensitive AI technology. We will do this by augmenting AI systems such as robots, virtual assistants, smart devices, and other agents with the ability to reflect. Here, this reflection includes learning and reasoning using self-models that include social factors, including context, trustworthiness, norms, network structure, and likely outcomes of actions. The latter, and the focus of this research program, requires internal simulations of the social systems of which the AI system is part. The impact of this will be intelligent socio-technical systems able to act collectively to intentionally create more sustainable, equitable, and efficient outcomes in shared environments. We plan to demonstrate this impact using simulation models of global sustainability challenges that include AI-based decision making, plus a case study on AI-supported community building for food security in Toronto.
This is part of a large investment of Canadian federal funding across research projects at Ontario Tech Univeristy. Read more at the Ontario Tech news site.
Dr. Peter lewis was interviewed live on the ‘NOW with Dave Brown’ show, on AMI TV. Peter talked about the accessibility of AI systems, and highlighted new research being carried out at Ontario Tech University, in collaboration with CNIB. There is an audio version of the interview available on Dave’s podcast, available here.
Read more about our research on accessibility and AI, funded by Accessibility Standards Canada, at the Ontario Tech news site.
This July, Trustworthy AI Lab researchers Dr. Aishwaryaprajna and Dr. Peter Lewis attended and presented at the 2023 edition of the International Conference on Artificial Life in Sapporo, Japan.
Dr. Aishwaryaprajna presented a paper on sustainable foraging in agent-based societies. The paper presented results on how endowing agents with a reflective governor, such that they are able to observe when their own behaviour is contributing to unsustainability, can overcome ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ style unsustainable outcomes.
Further, as part of his role as a board member of the International Society for Artificial Life with responsibility for Societal Impact, Dr. Lewis chaired the 7th Special Session on Alife and Society.
