Amazon and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that they are committing up to $10 million each in research grants focused on fairness in artificial intelligence over the next three years. As the use of artificial intelligence is increasing rapidly in everyday life, fairness has become a point of importance across educational institutions, government, and industry. And the fairness of the machine learning systems that Amazon builds to support their businesses are critical to establishing and maintaining customer trust.
Since AI technologies are contributing to economic growth and have the potential for improving the world, Amazon understands that they must work closely with academic researchers to develop innovative solutions for addressing issues of fairness, transparency, and accountability while ensuring that biases in data do not get embedded in systems that are created.
So Amazon and NSF are working together to support computational research focused on fairness in AI with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to handle the major challenges facing society. The specific topics of interest include transparency, mitigation strategies, accountability, potential adverse biases and effects, validation of fairness, and considerations of inclusivity.
Prem Natarajan, the VP of natural understanding in Amazon’s Alexa AI group, said the funded projects will help enable broadened acceptance of AI systems and will help the U.S. further capitalize on the potential of artificial intelligence. Amazon will be providing partial funding of the program and NSF will make award determinations independently and in accordance with their merit review process.
“We are excited to announce this new collaboration with Amazon to fund research focused on fairness in AI,” added NSF’s head for Computer and Information Science and Engineering Jim Kurose in a statement. “This program will support research related to the development and implementation of trustworthy AI systems that incorporate transparency, fairness, and accountability into the design from the beginning.”
Going forward, NSF and Amazon are intending to continue the program with calls for more proposals in 2020 and 2021. The call for proposals and more information about the program can be found at NSF.gov. And letters of intent must be submitted by May 10, 2019.
