On Tuesday (Dec. 5), the University of Notre Dame joined with partners around the world to launch the AI Alliance. The AI Alliance is a broad, international coalition of organizations that are working across numerous aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) education, research, development, deployment and governance. Its aim is to enhance the social benefits of AI by supporting open innovation and ensuring that AI systems are safe, secure and trustworthy.

“Innovations in artificial intelligence offer, at the same time, the promise of serving the common good and the threat of undermining it. It is critical that we engage serious ethical questions about AI alongside the technological,” said University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. “Notre Dame has long been a place for researching and reflecting on the ethical implications of science and technology, and we are pleased that through the AI Alliance we will be able to lend a distinctive voice and perspective to the conversation about building technologies that are both innovative and ethical.”

Led by IBM and Meta, the AI Alliance also includes builders of hardware and software such as AMD, as well as creators of open-source AI tools and models. In addition to Notre Dame, university partners in the AI Alliance include Cornell University; Dartmouth College; Imperial College London; Indian Institute of Technology Bombay; Technical University of Munich; the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society; University of Illinois; University of Tokyo; Yale University; and others.

Through the range and diversity of its partners, the AI Alliance plans to “shape the evolution of AI in ways that better reflect the needs and the complexity of our societies.” With this approach to AI development, the AI Alliance “stands in contrast to a vision that aims to relegate AI innovation and value creation to a small number of companies with a closed, proprietary vision for the AI industry.”

“The technologies that will truly move our world forward will be the ones that emerge from an inclusive, interdisciplinary innovation ecosystem,” said Jeffrey F. Rhoads, vice president for research and professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. “As a founding partner in the AI Alliance, Notre Dame’s engineers, data scientists, ethicists and other researchers will be able to collaborate to build that ecosystem, joining both with AI labs around the world and with the industry partners who get new technologies into the hands of users.”

Rhoads added, “This will bring an unprecedented opportunity to our faculty and our students as they help steer innovations that bring benefits to society.”

AI Alliance members will participate in working groups to develop the following:

• Benchmarks, tools and other resources that enable the responsible development and use of AI systems at a global scale.

• Benchmarks and evaluation standards for open model releases and model deployment into applications.

• An ecosystem of open foundation models with diverse modalities, including highly capable multilingual, multimodal and scientific models that can help address society-wide challenges in climate, human health and beyond.

• An AI hardware accelerator ecosystem that boosts the contributions and adoption of essential enabling software technology.

• AI skills building, education and exploratory research.

• Educational content and resources to inform the public discourse and policymakers on the benefits, risks, solutions and precision regulation for AI.

• Initiatives that encourage open development of AI in safe and beneficial ways and events to explore AI and show how alliance members are using open technology in AI responsibly and for good.

As it participates in the AI Alliance, Notre Dame builds upon its commitments in its recently announced Strategic Framework and will draw upon its established strengths in technology ethics research, applied technology ethics, values-based technology education, trusted AI and data science as a force for good.

To learn more about the AI Alliance, visit thealliance.ai.

Contact: Brandi Wampler, associate director of media relations, 574-631-2632, brandiwampler@nd.edu

Originally published by Brett Beasley at news.nd.edu on December 05, 2023.