MIT and the U.S. Air Force announced a new partnership that involves the launch of a new program designed for making fundamental advances in artificial intelligence that could improve Air Force operations while addressing broader societal needs.
The program is known as the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator — which will leverage the expertise and resources of MIT and the Air Force in order to conduct fundamental research directed at enabling rapid prototyping, scaling, and application of AI algorithms. And the Air Force is planning to invest approximately $15 million per year as it builds on a five-decade relationship with MIT.
The collaboration will support at least 10 MIT research projects addressing challenges that are important to both the Air Force and broader society like disaster response and medical readiness.
Under the terms of the agreement, MIT will form interdisciplinary teams of researchers, faculty, and students whose work focuses on topics in AI, control theory, formal methods, machine learning, robotics, and perception. And the teams will also include leaders in technology policy, history, and ethics. Air Force members will also join and provide expertise to each team.
“MIT is the leading institution for AI research, education, and application, making this a huge opportunity for the Air Force as we deepen and expand our scientific and technical enterprise,” said Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson. “Drawing from one of the best of American research universities is vital.”
And the AI Accelerator can include faculty, staff, and students at all five MIT schools. And it will be a component of the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing that is opening this fall.
The college is going to take a strongly interdisciplinary approach to computing and focus on the societal implications of computing and AI.
And the MIT-Air Force program is going to be housed in MIT’s Beaver Works facility — which is an innovation center located in the Technology Square block of Kendall Square. Plus MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Defense funded R&D center, will make its specialized facilities and resources available to support Air Force mission requirements.
“Our objective is to advance the underlying science behind AI and facilitate societal applications, including helping create solutions in fields like disaster relief and medical preparedness that are of interest to the Air Force,” added Daniela Rus — the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We plan to assemble interdisciplinary teams that will collaborate across disparate fields of AI to create new algorithms and solutions.”
The AI Accelerator research program is aiming to develop new algorithms to assist complex decision-making that may help the Air Force like better focusing its maintenance efforts — which is an expensive and critical part of its aircraft operations. This fundamental research also intends to develop AI to assist humans in planning, control, and other complex tasks.
“MIT continues to pursue research that addresses current problems, while training researchers to think through the implications for tomorrow as research is translated to new technologies and new problems,” explained Krystyn Van Vliet — associate provost and professor of materials science and engineering and of biological engineering. “The MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator allows MIT to demonstrate that concept when AI provides one of the tools for human decisions.
