research opportunity
Looking Forward: Challenges and Opportunities in Agentic AI Reliability
Xing, Liudong, Janet, null, Lin, null
The AI conversation can be traced as far back as Alan Turing's milestone paper published in 1950, which considered the fundamental question "Can machines think?" [1]. In 1956, AI got its name and mission as a scientific field at the first AI conference held at Dartmouth College [2]. Following AI's foundational period in the 1950s ~ 1970s, AI has evolved from early rule-based systems (1970s ~ 1990s), through classical machine learning and deep learning with neural networks (1990s ~ 2020s), to today's generative and agentic AI systems (since 2010s). Correspondingly, as a vital requirement of these systems, the reliability concept and concerns are also evolving, particularly in the interpretation of "required function" (see Table 1 in Chapter 10), based on the definition in standards like ISO 8402 "The ability of an item to perform a required function, under given environmental and operational conditions and for a stated period of time ". While a conventional AI system is concerned with providing stable and accurate classifications, predictions, or optimizations, a reliable generative AI system focuses on producing outputs that are trustworthy, consistent, safe, and contextually appropriate [3]. Building on both, a reliable agentic AI system should additionally conduct functions of reasoning, goal alignment, planning, safe adaption and interaction in dynamic and collaborative multi-agent contexts. The expansion of reliability concepts has introduced new challenges and research opportunities, as exemplified in Figure 1. In the following sections, we shed lights on these challenges and opportunities in building reliable AI systems, particularly, agentic AI systems.
Generative Artificial Intelligence: Evolving Technology, Growing Societal Impact, and Opportunities for Information Systems Research
Storey, Veda C., Yue, Wei Thoo, Zhao, J. Leon, Lukyanenko, Roman
The continuing, explosive developments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), built on large language models and related algorithms, has led to much excitement and speculation about the potential impact of this new technology. Claims include AI being poised to revolutionize business and society and dramatically change personal life. However, it remains unclear exactly how this technology, with its significantly distinct features from past AI technologies, has transformative potential. Nor is it clear how researchers in information systems (IS) should respond. In this paper, we consider the evolving and emerging trends of AI in order to examine its present and predict its future impacts. Many existing papers on GenAI are either too technical for most IS researchers or lack the depth needed to appreciate the potential impacts of GenAI. We, therefore, attempt to bridge the technical and organizational communities of GenAI from a system-oriented sociotechnical perspective. Specifically, we explore the unique features of GenAI, which are rooted in the continued change from symbolism to connectionism, and the deep systemic and inherent properties of human-AI ecosystems. We retrace the evolution of AI that proceeded the level of adoption, adaption, and use found today, in order to propose future research on various impacts of GenAI in both business and society within the context of information systems research. Our efforts are intended to contribute to the creation of a well-structured research agenda in the IS community to support innovative strategies and operations enabled by this new wave of AI.
Securing the AI Frontier: Urgent Ethical and Regulatory Imperatives for AI-Driven Cybersecurity
This paper critically examines the evolving ethical and regulatory challenges posed by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity. We trace the historical development of AI regulation, highlighting major milestones from theoretical discussions in the 1940s to the implementation of recent global frameworks such as the European Union AI Act. The current regulatory landscape is analyzed, emphasizing risk-based approaches, sector-specific regulations, and the tension between fostering innovation and mitigating risks. Ethical concerns such as bias, transparency, accountability, privacy, and human oversight are explored in depth, along with their implications for AI-driven cybersecurity systems. Furthermore, we propose strategies for promoting AI literacy and public engagement, essential for shaping a future regulatory framework. Our findings underscore the need for a unified, globally harmonized regulatory approach that addresses the unique risks of AI in cybersecurity. We conclude by identifying future research opportunities and recommending pathways for collaboration between policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers to ensure the responsible deployment of AI technologies in cybersecurity.
The Semantic Reader Project
The exponential growth in the rate of scientific publication4 and increasing interdisciplinary nature of scientific progress27 makes it increasingly hard for scholars to keep up with the latest developments. Academic search engines, such as Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar, help scholars discover research papers. Techniques such as automated summarization help scholars triage research papers.5 But when it comes to actually reading research papers, the process, often based on a static PDF format, has remained largely unchanged for many decades. This is a problem because digesting technical research papers in their conventional formats is difficult.2
Amman City, Jordan: Toward a Sustainable City from the Ground Up
The idea of smart cities (SCs) has gained substantial attention in recent years. The SC paradigm aims to improve citizens' quality of life and protect the city's environment. As we enter the age of next-generation SCs, it is important to explore all relevant aspects of the SC paradigm. In recent years, the advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has produced a trend of supporting daily objects with smartness, targeting to make human life easier and more comfortable. The paradigm of SCs appears as a response to the purpose of building the city of the future with advanced features. SCs still face many challenges in their implementation, but increasingly more studies regarding SCs are implemented. Nowadays, different cities are employing SC features to enhance services or the residents quality of life. This work provides readers with useful and important information about Amman Smart City.
AI for DevSecOps: A Landscape and Future Opportunities
Fu, Michael, Pasuksmit, Jirat, Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit
DevOps has emerged as one of the most rapidly evolving software development paradigms. With the growing concerns surrounding security in software systems, the DevSecOps paradigm has gained prominence, urging practitioners to incorporate security practices seamlessly into the DevOps workflow. However, integrating security into the DevOps workflow can impact agility and impede delivery speed. Recently, the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized automation in various software domains, including software security. AI-driven security approaches, particularly those leveraging machine learning or deep learning, hold promise in automating security workflows. They reduce manual efforts, which can be integrated into DevOps to ensure uninterrupted delivery speed and align with the DevSecOps paradigm simultaneously. This paper seeks to contribute to the critical intersection of AI and DevSecOps by presenting a comprehensive landscape of AI-driven security techniques applicable to DevOps and identifying avenues for enhancing security, trust, and efficiency in software development processes. We analyzed 99 research papers spanning from 2017 to 2023. Specifically, we address two key research questions (RQs). In RQ1, we identified 12 security tasks associated with the DevOps process and reviewed existing AI-driven security approaches. In RQ2, we discovered 15 challenges encountered by existing AI-driven security approaches and derived future research opportunities. Drawing insights from our findings, we discussed the state-of-the-art AI-driven security approaches, highlighted challenges in existing research, and proposed avenues for future opportunities.
AccidentGPT: Large Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Traffic Accident Analysis
Wu, Kebin, Li, Wenbin, Xiao, Xiaofei
Traffic accident analysis is pivotal for enhancing public safety and developing road regulations. Traditional approaches, although widely used, are often constrained by manual analysis processes, subjective decisions, uni-modal outputs, as well as privacy issues related to sensitive data. This paper introduces the idea of AccidentGPT, a foundation model of traffic accident analysis, which incorporates multi-modal input data to automatically reconstruct the accident process video with dynamics details, and furthermore provide multi-task analysis with multi-modal outputs. The design of the AccidentGPT is empowered with a multi-modality prompt with feedback for task-oriented adaptability, a hybrid training schema to leverage labelled and unlabelled data, and a edge-cloud split configuration for data privacy. To fully realize the functionalities of this model, we proposes several research opportunities. This paper serves as the stepping stone to fill the gaps in traditional approaches of traffic accident analysis and attract the research community attention for automatic, objective, and privacy-preserving traffic accident analysis.
Towards Algorithmic Fairness in Space-Time: Filling in Black Holes
Flynn, Cheryl, Guha, Aritra, Majumdar, Subhabrata, Srivastava, Divesh, Zhou, Zhengyi
New technologies and the availability of geospatial data have drawn attention to spatio-temporal biases present in society. For example: the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted disparities in the availability of broadband service and its role in the digital divide; the environmental justice movement in the United States has raised awareness to health implications for minority populations stemming from historical redlining practices; and studies have found varying quality and coverage in the collection and sharing of open-source geospatial data. Despite the extensive literature on machine learning (ML) fairness, few algorithmic strategies have been proposed to mitigate such biases. In this paper we highlight the unique challenges for quantifying and addressing spatio-temporal biases, through the lens of use cases presented in the scientific literature and media. We envision a roadmap of ML strategies that need to be developed or adapted to quantify and overcome these challenges -- including transfer learning, active learning, and reinforcement learning techniques. Further, we discuss the potential role of ML in providing guidance to policy makers on issues related to spatial fairness.
Senior Researcher Job – Statistical Genetics and Machine Learning, Aarhus, Denmark, Feb 2022
We expect the applicant to have experience in the fields of statistics, data science, genetics, and software development. The successful candidate will contribute to and lead one or more major research projects focused on improving polygenic risk scores and other genetic analyses. The successful applicant is then expected to write up the results, present them at international conferences, and publish in peer-reviewed scientific articles. A senior researcher position at Aarhus University is vacant from May 1st 2022, or soon thereafter. We are seeking a highly motivated person to develop and apply statistical and machine learning methods for genetic analyses and genetic risk prediction.
Machine Learning Towards Intelligent Systems: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities
Injadat, MohammadNoor, Moubayed, Abdallah, Nassif, Ali Bou, Shami, Abdallah
The emergence and continued reliance on the Internet and related technologies has resulted in the generation of large amounts of data that can be made available for analyses. However, humans do not possess the cognitive capabilities to understand such large amounts of data. Machine learning (ML) provides a mechanism for humans to process large amounts of data, gain insights about the behavior of the data, and make more informed decision based on the resulting analysis. ML has applications in various fields. This review focuses on some of the fields and applications such as education, healthcare, network security, banking and finance, and social media. Within these fields, there are multiple unique challenges that exist. However, ML can provide solutions to these challenges, as well as create further research opportunities. Accordingly, this work surveys some of the challenges facing the aforementioned fields and presents some of the previous literature works that tackled them. Moreover, it suggests several research opportunities that benefit from the use of ML to address these challenges.