Ushering in a ‘Smart’ Future Responsibly

In Hollywood, powerful evil artificial intelligences take over governments, destroy planets and predict our every move. In real life, the problems with AI are often those of their creators — perpetuating and worsening gender and racial biases. To fight these biases and restore public trust in AI, researchers are turning to the public. 

Hamed Tabkhi, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is working with community stakeholders and researchers from the criminal justice and criminology, electrical and computer engineering, and civil and environmental engineering departments and the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, to “co-create and co-design” solutions to public safety with AI. The team received $2 million for the inaugural year of the National Science Foundation’s Smart and Connected Communities program and continues visiting the community, developing the anomaly detection capabilities of their AI and creating more relationships with other entities to figure out how they can integrate the technology into existing security infrastructures.

See the full feature story to learn more about Tabkhi’s research.