Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Safe and Secure Artificial Intelligence Solutions (SAIS)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.The planning grant enables the principal investigators (PIs) to work with a full spectrum of stakeholders to prepare the groundwork for establishing an Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Safe and Secure Artificial Intelligence Solutions (SAIS). The proposed center focuses on development of fundamental, theoretically-grounded, and systematic approaches to enable safe and secure AI and establishment of an interdisciplinary community that engages all stakeholders. Scholars from multiple disciplines and practitioners from multiple fields will work together to fully understand the problems and explore the design space. The success of this endeavor can potentially lead to enabling technologies for secure machine learning systems, thereby accelerating their development and widening their adoption in different application domains. Regional educators and government/industrial employers will be engaged to train cybersecurity workforce. Overall the proposed ERC SAIS contributes significantly to the protection of future cyber and physical world and safeguarding the human society. The PIs will identify and engage the SAIS stakeholder community, including partners and participants from academics, government and military agencies, research centers, and various industries. The interdisciplinary team will plan a long-term vision and direction for SAIS and identify key research and development thrusts, based on the inputs from all stakeholders. The team will develop marketing plan, future member recruiting plan, and cooperative membership agreement (including membership eligibility, commitment, and intellectual property ownership). The team will decide the center's administration structure and management policies and guidelines. The team also will identify a set of research, education, workforce development, and outreach projects to be carried out during the first two years should the center be established. Finally, the team will create plans to work with university admission and K-12 educators to inspire and improve the participation of underrepresented groups in the proposed ERC SIAS and introduce cybersecurity to school counselors, teachers, students, and parents.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.