Good Systems

The latest newsletter for Good Systems looks at surveillance in American elections and how candidates are using new campaign apps to collect information about voters. Other topics include the unveiling of the new National Science Foundation Institute for Machine Learning planned at UT and highlights of upcoming events.

The National Science Foundation has selected The University of Texas at Austin to lead the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, bolstering the university’s existing strengths in this emerging field. Good Systems will be the institute’s AI Ethics partner.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to have extremely beneficial but also detrimental effects on society as we know it. From helpful home robots run amok to artificial intelligence that widens the gap between rich and poor, there are many ways the increasingly present AI in our lives can go bad. University of Texas computer scientist Peter Stone joins the College of Natural Science’s “Point of Discovery” podcast to talk about this issue.

Good Systems researchers from across the 40 Acres and beyond had continued to pivot to COVID-19 research because of the urgency. Today, teams are working on everything from mapping the spread of coronavirus through the New York transportation system to helping health care workers better understand the news.

Good Systems researchers are working on everything from mapping the spread of coronavirus through the New York transportation system to helping health care workers better understand the news. To date, we are leading at least a dozen projects related to COVID-19, just as our grand challenge moves into its second year.

Associate Professor Junfeng Jiao and two research associates in UT’s Urban Information Lab are gathering commuter train and highway traffic data from across New York state to determine where the next COVID-19 hotspots will be.

Good Systems researchers are studying how media representations shape the public’s understanding of the social benefits and ills of artificial intelligence. We’re looking for undergraduate and graduate students to craft short narratives that push beyond standard representations of sentient killer robots or helpful droids and instead grapple with the potential benefits or harms of AI that are actually emerging today.  We’re […]

“From text messages to posts on social media, there are algorithms that can process that language and detect behavioral patterns, even emotion and sentiment,” explains S. Craig Watkins, who is researching the power of “values-driven AI.” His project explores how AI-powered technology can reduce barriers for adolescents or young adults seeking mental health help.

The Good Systems grand challenge funds projects that help ensure AI technologies meet society’s needs and values. This year’s grant options are divided into three tiers based on activity type. Proposal deadline is 5 p.m., Friday, March 27, 2020.

The White House released guiding principles for regulating AI last month. Computer science researcher Peter Stone says they’re a “fantastic step forward,” with two important caveats.

The Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) Conference on Undergraduate Informatics Education will explore how to prepare undergraduate students for careers in the public and non-profit sectors, serving the public interest, particularly in support of social justice. This 1.5-day conference will be held on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin on March 3 and 4, 2020. This conference will serve as a meeting place for educators across disciplines, uniting around a common goal and vision. The conference will help to define what undergraduate education for public interest technology looks like. The conference will also showcase how individuals affiliated with member institutions can best leverage their involvement in PIT-UN, as well as showcase the benefits of PIT-UN membership to individuals that are not yet one of the participating PIT-UN institutions. To learn more about best practices and pedagogies for undergraduate informatics education, to learn more about public interest technology, and to learn more about PIT-UN, we encourage you to attend this first meeting in a series of events sponsored by PIT-UN and what we hope will become a recurring conference.

“Ethics is about empowering people, so it’s critical that we design AI in ways that empower people and build a more equitable and just society.”

“The emphasis on public interest technology is further demonstrated by the Good Systems Grand UT Challenge Initiative, which seeks to ensure artificial intelligence is designed to benefit society. Good Systems brings together students and researchers from more than two dozen schools and units within the university to focus not only on what AI can do, but what it should do for the public good.”

We know people and AI can be more successful together than apart, but we also know that AI can be used in ways that are harmful. How can we develop and evaluate intelligent systems and avoid dangerous unintended consequences? Can we use and regulate AI-based technologies with societal values and ethics at their core? What makes a system “good”?

We have less than a decade to find out. Please join us on this journey.

“We’ve come to appreciate in society that technology in general, AI in particular, is a life and death matter. We don’t have very many ethical checks on IT development. If you want to release a new app on the app store, you just need Apple to approve it. It’s tremendously easy to release a new software product, but it could have very severe, potentially life-threatening consequences.” 

President Fenves introduced Good Systems during the 2019 State of the University Address: “The third Bridging Barriers Grand Challenge will work to ensure that the needs and values of society drive the design of artificial intelligence technologies.”

“Before trust in artificial intelligence can be established, soldiers must first feel they have ownership of their robots, and the technology must be transparent enough ‘to make sure that humans can understand and interpret why a machine is making the decision it’s making,’ Ken Fleischmann, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information, said recently at a Mad Scientist conference in Austin. Fleischmann pointed out that while the development of artificial intelligence has yielded brilliant outcomes with chess and other games, it’s quite another thing to have a robot that will ‘behave ethically on the battlefield.'”

“The whole purpose of Good Systems is to ensure that AI is making the world a better place and is helping people. That’s exactly what we’re doing in this project. We’re using AI to help people.”

“When developing policy guidelines and regulation, it is critically important to separate these various technologies and applications so as to deal with them individually. Any effort to consider all of AI as one unit when developing policies and initiatives would be very misguided.” — Peter Stone, Department of Computer Science professor and Good Systems founding researcher

In October, Good Systems team members hosted a Good Systems 311 Calls and 500 City Hackathon. UT students used A.I. and machine learning methods to analyze large scale data sets of 311 calls, which log resident complaints, concerns, and non-emergency problems. This is valuable information that, when examined on aggregate, can help inform local decision-makers and city planners.

The Good Systems development year is off to a running start! Thank you to everyone who has made our first two events a success. You have shown drive an initiative in this new UT Grand Challenge from Bridging Barriers and we hope to keep that enthusiasm going throughout the year.

Vice President for Research Dan Jaffe introduces Planet Texas 2050 and new projects in development that could one day become grand challenges at The University of Texas at Austin.