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

工程研究中心规划拨款竞赛是ERC项目的试点征集。规划补助金不需要作为ERC竞赛的一部分，但它旨在在团队之间建立能力，以规划聚合的、中心规模的工程研究。该计划拨款使主要研究人员（pi）能够与全方位的利益相关者合作，为建立安全和可靠的人工智能解决方案（SAIS）工程研究中心（ERC）做好准备。拟议中的中心侧重于开发基本的、基于理论的和系统的方法，以实现安全可靠的人工智能，并建立一个让所有利益相关者参与的跨学科社区。多学科的学者和多领域的实践者将共同努力，充分理解问题，探索设计空间。这一努力的成功可能会导致安全机器学习系统的启用技术，从而加速它们的发展并扩大它们在不同应用领域的采用。地区教育工作者和政府/工业雇主将参与培训网络安全劳动力。总的来说，拟议的ERC SAIS对保护未来的网络和物理世界以及保护人类社会做出了重大贡献。pi将确定并参与SAIS利益相关者社区，包括来自学术界、政府和军事机构、研究中心和各种行业的合作伙伴和参与者。跨学科团队将规划SAIS的长期愿景和方向，并根据所有利益相关者的投入确定关键的研究和开发重点。团队将制定营销计划、未来的会员招募计划和合作会员协议（包括会员资格、承诺和知识产权所有权）。该小组将决定该中心的行政结构和管理政策和指导方针。该团队还将确定一套研究、教育、劳动力发展和推广项目，如果中心成立，将在头两年进行。最后，该团队将制定计划，与大学招生和K-12教育工作者合作，激励和提高未被充分代表的群体参与拟议的ERC SIAS，并向学校辅导员、教师、学生和家长介绍网络安全。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.