3Ai Masters 2020 Program Open

Applications are open for the 3Ai Masters 2020 program. This is at the  Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai), set up by Professor Genevieve Bell, at the Australian National University in Canberra. Exactly what the Institute does it a bit hard to explain. They say "... we are building the knowledge and tools needed to ensure that as technology advances, humanity advances with it ...".

I have had the pleasure of sitting in the ANU Computer Science and Information Technology common room with the first cohort of students. They are a diverse and interesting collection of people. Some are hard core computer nerds, but with a wide range of interests.

New Applied Science of Cyber-physical Systems

Greetings from the opening of the new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Professor Genevieve Bell, aims to create a new applied science to address the challenge of cyber-physical systems.

The institute has started with sixteen masters students, who will help work out what this new discipline is. The emphasis is on "cross disciplinary" work. For 2019, there are courses, starting with "Fundamentals of a New Applied Science I" (CECS6001).

Inventing a new discipline, while teaching it, is something rarely attempted, and even more rarely succeeds. I suggest the new Institute would benefit from studying past attempts and having the students research these. 

One example is Environmental Studies at Griffith University:

"Australian Environmental Studies was so near the academic cutting edge in the early seventies that the primary challenge for the first Chairman, Professor Calvin Rose, was to determine what actually constituted the field of environmental studies." From: Preparing for the Future: A History of Griffith University, Noel Quirke, 1996, p. 11 

Environmental Studies continue today at Griffith University. A better known international example is the Bauhaus, a German art and design school of the early 20th Century. The organization suffered internal conflict and external pressure. I was invited to talk to the Bauhaus Dessau", but while this occupies the original premises, it has a limited and less radical outlook.

ps: I first came across Professor Bell, in 2009 with the Realising Our Broadband Future forum. Then in 2010, speaking at the NLA in Canberra on The Future is Messy, the next week I bumped into her at the SA Library in Adelaide cafe. She was cited in the 2011Regional Telecommunications Review. Then in 2017, it was announced she was joining us at ANU.

Reference

Launch of the ANU 3Ai Masters Program 15 February

The Australian National University's new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai) will be launching its first masters program 15 February 2019 in Canberra. Founded by Professor Genevieve Bell, 3Ai aims to create a new applied science to address the challenge of cyber-physical systems. Exactly what that is, I am not sure, but it will make for some interesting discussions. The Institute just a few steps from my office at ANU. ;-)

Humanising Machine Intelligence

Professor Robert
C Williamson

Greetings from the ANU Grand Challenges pitch night in Canberra.  Four teams are presenting their ideas. One will receive funding. The first is "Humanising Machine Intelligence" (HMI). This appeared to share some aspects of the ANU 3A Institute. Also on this theme, Dr Roger Clarke recently released draft "Guidelines for the Responsible Business Use of AI".

Trust and cyber physical systems

Greetings from the "Trust and cyber physical systems

Dr Philippa Ryan

workshop" at the Australian National University in Canberra. This is run by the ANU's new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute. Dr. Genevieve Bell, 3A Director did an introduction and Dr Philippa Ryan is running the exercises (author of the forthcoming book "Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies"). We have a lot of post-it notes, colored pens and string.

As someone from STEM I am a little lost with the discussion of law and language. This is one of those exercises where you have to play a little. It might be interesting to use Lego Serious Play as conducted by Dr Stephen Dann.

Join Genevieve Bell's 3A Institute of AI at ANU to Change the World

The new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3A Institute) at the Australian National University is seeking two Associate Professors and three postdoctoral/research fellows. The new staff will work with Professor Genevieve Bell at the 3A Institute "... to build a new applied science around the management of artificial intelligence, data and technology and of their impact on humanity". It is not every day you are invited to change the world. ;-)

ps: Dr Bell's is down the corridor from mine at the

ANU College of Engineering & Computer Science in Canberra. It will be interesting to see what develops.

Genevieve Bell Heads ANU 3A Institute of AI

Greeting from the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, where Professor Genevieve Bell is speaking on "Managing the Machines: building a new applied science for the 21st century". This is also live streaming on Facebook and YouTube

Dr. Bell will be presenting the ABC 2017 Boyer Lectures and has been appointed the inaugural McKenzie Chair at the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science. She will also head the new "Three A" institute (although I am not sure what that is).

I first came across Dr. Bell, at the Realising Our Broadband Future forum, in Sydney, 2009, where it was refreshing to hear ideas about broadband for people to use. She talked at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia, where she noted English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. The next week I bumped into Dr Bell at the State Library of South Australia, where she had been the state's Thinker in Residence on South Australia’s Digital Futures.

You have to listen carefully to a speech from Dr. Bell, not just because she talks fast  and with enthusiasm (reminds me of Pia Waugh).

Dr. Bell stared with a history lesson, on the start of the engineering as a profession at the time of the French Revolution in Paris, then Constantinople and the UK. She characterized engineers as managing systems and being certified and licensed by the state. She then jumped to the USA and the creation of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I lost the thread at this point, but we ended up in the creation of Artificial Intelligence as a discipline. 

The story then jumped to Australia, with the building of SILLIAC, an Australian 1950s computer (built after  CSIRAC Australia's first computer, around 1949). But the story was really about how to combine theory and practice, plus what exactly is it that we want to research and do? 


Dr Bell had three questions on Autonomy, Agency and Assurance. She suggested we need to think about in what sense machines are "autonomous". I am not sure this is such a new issue. We have had machines which can act on their own for decades and also have such legal structures as companies as persons. A non-trivial case is in the law of war, where autonomous weapons have existed for more than a hundred years.

The next question was how much Agency, machines should have. This seems to be the same question as the first, being how much autonomy there should be.  A current example of this is the Commonwealth Bank, accused of 54,000 cases of money laundering. The Bank is not a person and it was automated teller machines which processed the cash, so who is responsible?

The third question is assurance: how we can be sure these machines are safe? This is also no a new question.  Engineers and more recently software engineers, have had to consider how safe sould be and how to work out if it is. This is made more difficult by AI, but it is something I routinely as of students when I am teaching professional ethics.

At this point I finally worked out what the 3A Institute was to be: the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute.