National Science Foundations gets $5 million grant for human/AI integration. (Source: Google)

NSF to Use $5M Grant for Shaping Future Of Human/AI Workflow

As pandemic infection numbers continue to rise and fall around the world, with businesses opening and closing accordingly,  the world continues to pursue high tech business at a greater rate, particularly depending on AI.

In anticipation of that growing need, an article in cnet.com highlights how Google on Wednesday announced a $5 million grant and partnership with the U.S. National Science Foundation to create a National AI Research Institute for Human-AI Interaction and Collaboration. In addition, Google will provide expertise in the field of artificial intelligence, collaborate on research and offer cloud computing support for researchers and educators working with the program.

In the blog post announcing the partnership, Google says studies have suggested that AI systems and humans working together make better decisions than either of them acting alone.

“People and AI systems shape each other,” reads the post, “and in order to realize the full potential of AI for social benefit, positive and productive human-AI interaction and collaboration is critical.”

Google has been working in this area over the last several years, publishing hundreds of research papers in human-computer interaction and visualization; bringing industry and academic experts together at events like the PAIR Symposium and top research conferences; designing tools like Facets, the What-If Tool, and the Language Interpretability Tool to better understand datasets and models; creating the Model Card Toolkit for model transparency and a People + AI guidebook to support human-centered AI development; building better human-AI interfaces in our products like smart predictions in Gboard and auto-captioning with the Live Transcribe app; and enabling anyone to help make AI-powered products more useful through efforts like Crowdsource and Translate Community.

In other words, there is a new AI “kid” in class, and businesses will need to learn to get along with it.

Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called for more government regulation of AI in an op-ed for the Financial Times, just months after the company faced widespread public backlash for reportedly collecting health data on millions of Americans to help develop a medical AI program.

The article points out that in this time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China, an example would be the war on Tik Tok that the president has declared over the fear of security breaches, it’s likely conflict will grow. But the problems will be solved if AI and humans working in sync—and maybe they’ll find a way for the nations of the world to do the same thing.

read more at cnet.com