Safeguarded AI: Technical Area 3 Applications

Tender description

ARIA is an R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. We empower scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is technologically or scientifically possible. We will reach across disciplines, sectors and institutions to shape, fund and manage projects across the R&D ecosystem, from startups to universities, to break down silos and discover new pathways. We are looking for proposals for our Safeguarded AI: Theory programme. For more info see here https://www.aria.org.uk/programme-safeguarded-ai/ Lot 1: Through TA3, we will look to demonstrate a 'gatekeeper' workflow that could be used to create and maintain decision-support tools and/or safeguard autonomous AI systems to solve specific, economically valuable challenges. As part of this work, teams will elicit functional and non-functional requirements from customers for a proposed product, then outline simplified versions for very concrete use cases. These specifications will serve as the benchmark evaluations for our entire research programme, as we'll look to develop AI systems specifically tailored to solve them. A full set of applications will be determined after the TA3 solicitation, but some applications we're currently considering include: energy system optimisation; infectious disease epidemiology, climate and weather prediction; aircraft and spaceflight dynamics; and control systems for robots in human environments. The solicitation will run in two phases: Phase one: In the initial phase, we'll distribute funding to deeply understand customer needs and elicit requirements, this may include: sourcing datasets, designing evaluation suites to validate the performance of predictive models and autonomous or semi-autonomous controllers. Phase two: Successful teams (estimated 2-4 groups total) will then advance to the second phase, where they will receive significant funding to apply the tools developed in the other Technical Areas to their application domain. Our thesis Safeguarded AI: constructing guaranteed safety (https://www.aria.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ARIA-Safeguarded-AI-Programme-Thesis-V1.pdf) gives a detailed overview of how this workstream compliments the whole programme. ARIA Creators (recipients of ARIA's funding), gain access to the programme's research community, ARIA's programme leadership and wider community. You can find out more here https://www.aria.org.uk/programme-safeguarded-ai/