Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems

Advances in machine learning, high-performance computing, data science, multimodal sensing, and control are coming together to create enormous opportunities for intelligent, autonomous, or semi-autonomous systems. Such artificial intelligence systems are starting to achieve cognitive abilities such as language, attention, and creativity, promising to improve the safety and efficiency of our systems for health care, transportation, manufacturing, innovation, the food pipeline, and urban life.

Our research focuses on questions such as: How can we ensure safety of learning-enabled autonomous systems such as self-driving cars? How can we introduce more common sense and critical reasoning thinking into these intelligent systems? How can we ensure that the autonomous systems know when to ask for help? How can we achieve on-device intelligence with attendant constraints on energy, volume, and latency while meeting real-time requirements? What are the fundamental limits and performance guarantees of artificial intelligence systems? Our research in this theme draws on the department's foundational strengths in machine learning and information theory, computer vision, robotics and control, language and speech, data and network science, formal methods, computer security, distributed computing, and high-performance computing.