Some Grant News
11 September 2020
I’m very pleased to be playing a role in a couple of new NSF grants. One is an NSF EAGER exploratory grant with my advisor/former PI James Pustejovsky at Brandeis University and Josh Hartshorne at Boston College, A Playground and Proposal for Growing an AGI. With support from the Robust Intelligence program at the IIS division at NSF, we are addressing the challege of creating an Artificial General Intelligence by (from the abstract) “synthesizing symbolic or logical reasoning, learning through interaction with the environment, as well as state-of-the-art neural networks. Inspired by the structure of natural (e.g., human) intelligence, the resulting mental architecture deploys each of these strategies for the problems they excel at.” It’s a lofty goal, and well-suited to the high-risk/high-potential nature of an EAGER. At present, I am just a small consultant subcontract, but our hope is to lay the groundwork for a larger, long-term grant.
The second grant is a $20 million NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming, aiming to bring interactive AI agents into K-12 classrooms. This effort is led by CU Boulder and the CSU effort is led by my colleage Ross Beveridge: More information here. Other partners in the institute include UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Brandeis University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Tech, UIUC, and UW-Madison.