The Centre for Artificial Intelligence has just been launched at The University of Technology in Sydney, where researchers will focus on both the theory and technology that will allow us to create intelligent machines with greater capacity for perception, learning and reasoning – AKA our new robot overlords.
The CAI will develop machine learning, social robotics, business intelligence, computer vision, computational intelligence, brain computer interface, data science and information systems.
“Establishing this Centre gives us the opportunity to explore beyond core technology and into the impact of our discoveries,” said UTS Deputy Vice- Chancellor Research Professor Glenn Wightwick.
“This includes the ethics of artificial intelligence, such as interrogating the way it will impact the future of work; and moral decisions we will need to explore around developments such as driverless vehicles.”
Centre Director Distinguished Professor Jie Lu said that the CAI is already producing cutting-edge research in specialist areas and will provide new opportunities in leadership and development.
“We will have five dedicated labs making interconnections between collected data, behaviour and knowledge exchange, meeting the needs of organisations for advanced knowledge of behaviours, and accurate analysis of big data, helping to identify and develop solutions,” Lu said.
The five labs are Decision Systems and E-Service Intelligence (DESI) (developing theories, methods and software systems using Big Data); Computational Intelligence and Brain Computer Interface Lab (human performance augmentation and human machine autonomous systems); The Magic Lab (a social robotics group); Knowledge Infrastructure (computational intelligence that can examine, extract and transport knowledge) and Data Science and Knowledge Discovery (data mining, machine learning and computer vision).
The team says CAI research has led to significant impacts in both academia and industry, developing systems for governments, industry partners, and research institutions.
“Systems include data mining platforms for recommendations and user modelling, question answering, large scale information retrieval systems, intelligent vision systems for efficient video and image retrieval, detection and indexing. Our researchers consistently place top of many international competitions in image, video and multimedia analytics,” said Centre Co-Director, Distinguished Professor CT Lin, co-author of Neural Fuzzy Systems and the author of Neural Fuzzy Control Systems with Structure and Parameter Learning.
The Centre’s Research Director is ARC Future Fellow Professor Ivor Tsang, whose research expertise is Machine Learning on Big Data. The CAI has integrated a set of excellent researchers in the main areas of AI, with four distinguished AI professors; four past/current ARC College of Experts and 100 PhD students.
[UTS]