Nebraska's Hau Chan has been selected to be part of an international research effort focused on the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence. The project is part of a broader collaboration between the National Science Foundation and CSIRO (Australia's national science agency) to fund groundbreaking artificial intelligence research that ultimately solves environmental and societal issues. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln will lead U.S. research efforts in collaboration with the New York-based Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of New South Wales. The work will concentrate on the development of AI-powered solutions to drought, harmful environmental emissions and infectious diseases. Chan, assistant professor in the School of Computing, will serve as principal investigator on a project that will use AI to determine appropriate allocation of resources such as water, vaccines, medical supplies and non-fossil fuel vehicle stations.

Consciousness is a sequential process of awareness which can focus on one piece of information at a time. This process of awareness experiences causation which underpins the notion of time while it interplays with matter and energy, forming reality. The study of Consciousness, time and reality is complex and evolving fast in many fields, including metaphysics and fundamental physics. Reality composes patterns in human Consciousness in response to the regularities in nature. These regularities could be physical (e.g., astronomical, environmental), biological, chemical, mental, social, etc. The patterns that emerged in Consciousness were correlated to the environment, life and social behaviours followed by constructed frameworks, systems and structures. The complex constructs evolved as cultures, customs, norms and values, which created a diverse society. In the evolution of responsible AI, it is important to be attuned to the evolved cultural, ethical and moral values through Consciousness. This requires the advocated design of self-learning AI aware of time perception and human ethics.

Intel Deep Learning Boost (Intel DL Boost) brings accelerated performance to demanding workloads, without the need for a discrete add-on accelerator. Built-in accelerators like Intel DL Boost speed up inferencing and training across common AI workloads and offer more flexibility and higher resource utilization than dedicated GPU-based platforms, and only Intel offers x86 data center CPUs with built-in AI accelerators. Access the PDF: Intel DL Boost brings accelerated performance without the need for a discrete add-on accelerator.

With a new grant from the U.S. Army, a team of scientists will seek to enhance artificial intelligence by integrating brain cells called astrocytes. By encoding a feature of biological intelligence called reinforcement learning, in which we iteratively learn from successes and failures, "deep neural networks" (DNNs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence with spectacular demonstrations of mastery in Chess and Go. But they struggle to deal with the real-world problems encountered daily by humans and other animals. A new collaboration based at MIT posits that a fundamental shortcoming of deep neural networks is that they are merely neural. The team aims to prove DNNs could become much more powerful by integrating another brain cell type: astrocytes.