New Partnership Aims to Demystify Artificial Intelligence "Black Boxes"

The promise of artificial intelligence to solve problems in drug design, discover how babies learn language, and make progress in many other areas has been stymied by the inability of humans to understand what's going on inside AI systems. Researchers at six universities, including The University of Texas at Austin, are launching a partnership aimed at turning these AI "black boxes" into human-interpretable computer code, allowing them to solve hitherto unsolvable problems. The new partnership, called Understanding the World Through Code, is made possible by a major new grant from the National Science Foundation, through its Expeditions in Computing program. This initiative is focused on "ambitious fundamental research agendas that promise to define the future of computing and information." These grants, given to just three teams every two years, are the largest given by the NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.