Seeking a new element in artificial intelligence: trust

BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - For decades, the cybersecurity community has devised protections to fend off malicious software attacks and identify and fix flaws that can disrupt the computing programs that are central to all aspects of life. Now, a team of researchers from New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Columbia University has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop some of the first tools to bring those same protections to artificial intelligence (AI) systems. "There are ways to test and debug computer software before you deploy it and methods of verifying that your software works as you expect it to," said Siddharth Garg, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon. "There's nothing analogous for AI systems, and we're developing a tool suite that will lead to safer, more secure deployment of the systems used in autonomous driving, medical imaging, and other applications," he said. In addition to Garg, the research team includes NYU Tandon assistant professors Anna Choromanska, in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, and Suman Jana, an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University School of Engineering.