Researcher Lee Fisher (left) is working to merge prosthetic limbs with the nervous system. Pat Bayne (right) says a prototype has partially restored her sense of touch: "I know there's no hand there, but I can feel it." Researcher Lee Fisher (left) is working to merge prosthetic limbs with the nervous system. Pat Bayne (right) says a prototype has partially restored her sense of touch: "I know there's no hand there, but I can feel it." A team at the University of Pittsburgh is trying to make prosthetic limbs that work like the one in a Star Wars movie. After Luke Skywalker loses a hand in a lightsaber fight, "They give him this new hand, and you can't tell that it's not his own," says Lee Fisher, a biomedical engineer.

Out of 11 proposals that were accepted this year by the NSF Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon, two are led by UMD faculty. The program's goals are to increase accountability and transparency in AI algorithms and make them more accessible so that the benefits of AI are available to everyone. This includes machine learning algorithms--a subset of AI in which computerized systems are "trained" on large datasets to allow them to make proper decisions. Machine learning is used by some colleges around the country to rank applications for admittance to graduate school or allocate resources for faculty mentoring, teaching assistantships or coveted graduate fellowships. "As these AI-based systems are increasingly used in higher education, we want to make sure they render representations that are accurate and fair, which will require developing models that are free of both human and machine biases," said Furong Huang, an assistant professor of computer science who is leading one of the UMD teams.