REU Site: Interdisciplinary AI Research for Undergraduates

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The overall aim of the REU Site is to provide undergraduate students with a research experience that leads to publishable work in interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence, as well as educate students in the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is having increasing impact in our everyday lives, whether through interacting with smart speakers and digital assistants, preventing collisions, discovering new medicines, intelligent tutoring, Google Translate, and many more avenues. AI is also one of the most controversial new technologies, as many critiques have been made concerning its potential risk as an existential threat, its use as a tool of oppression by authoritarian governments, its use in sentencing decisions by judges, and its biases due to datasets based on human judgments. It is imperative that students and the public become aware of the promise and the potential impacts, good or bad, on our future. In addition, a 2016 World Economic Forum Report “The Future of Jobs 2018” estimates that there will be 58 million new jobs in AI by 2022. Hence, more students, and more diverse students, must be recruited and trained in AI methods and ethics. This project will train eleven students per year for three years, including half from local community colleges, to prepare them for careers in responsible AI.This project will train eleven students per year in interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence, as well as the ethics of AI research, including its potential benefits and dangers. In addition, the approach is collaborative, rather than competitive, research, as modern AI discoveries will be made by researchers who are willing to work with scientists from other disciplines in order to be able to approach problems with the best tools available no matter what discipline created them. Introducing students to this collaborative approach to Artificial Intelligence is a necessary step to prepare them to contribute to science as it is practiced in the 21st century. A crucial aspect of the project is that it is a thirty week academic year program, giving the trainees the necessary time to absorb the material, think about the project, develop approaches, and test them. The program will begin with an AI Boot Camp, which will meet the first eight Saturdays of the academic year, giving the students a crash course in gradient descent and its application in deep learning. The students will begin with heavily scaffolded starter projects that will give them an initial taste of success. From there, they will apply acquired skills to interdisciplinary projects being carried out in active research labs at UC San Diego. The project mentors include faculty who are using AI in their research in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Psychology, and the Contextual Robotics Institute.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.