AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence

The AI Institute for ARtificial and Natural Intelligence (ARNI) will draw together top researchers across the country to focus on a national priority: connecting the major progress made in artificial intelligence (AI) systems to the revolution in our understanding of the brain. The past ten years have seen spectacular progress in interrogating neural activity, circuitry, and learning, yet our neuroscience insights have so far informed AI only superficially. Conversely, our rapidly advancing AI methods and systems have only begun to impact neuroscience. ARNI is a collaboration between Columbia University, Tuskegee University, City University of New York, Baylor College of Medicine, UT Health Houston, Mila QC, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Princeton. Industry partners include Google, Deepmind, IBM, Amazon, and Meta. ARNI will meet the urgent need for new paradigms of interdisciplinary training and research between neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI. This will accelerate progress in all three fields and broaden the transformative impact on society in the next decade. ARNI researchers will work together to tackle the limitations and challenges of current learning systems, including learning with limited data, reasoning about causality and uncertainty, and lifelong learning, which are all hallmarks of biological systems, and will also extend the frontier of understanding how brains compute and learn. ARNI will bridge the current significant gaps between artificial and biological networks and make room for all kinds of applications, ranging from: industrial applications, such as robust, interpretable medical decisions and smarter home assistants; to societal applications, such as better social safety nets and assistive multimodal systems to help the vulnerable; to scientific discoveries such as providing hypotheses about brain function and creating powerful tools for extracting insights from massive data. The institute will provide educational and research opportunities for undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral trainees, within and at the interface of AI, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Outreach partners, including the Neuromatch Academy and the New York Hall of Science, will help inform the public of these new developments and teach critical skills to the next generation of students. The U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering [DoD-OUSD (R&E)] is partnering with NSF to provide funding for this Institute. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.