Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) have established a multi-million-dollar partnership to accelerate research initiatives aimed at tackling global challenges, such as climate change, building low-emissions technologies, and developing ethical artificial intelligence.
CSRIO Chief Executive Larry Marshall said the two organisations have both launched a series of initiatives across the two countries in a span of one year, with a $100 million NSF Global Centres Program set to launch this month.
A total of USD 1.8 million from NSF and AUD 2.3 million from CSIRO have been allocated to support three Australia-US teams in their efforts to create responsible and ethical AI. These projects are:
- Fair Sequential Collective Decision-Making – University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and UNSW Sydney;
- Understanding Bias in AI Models for the Prediction of Infectious Disease Spread – Arizona State University, George Mason University, UNSW Sydney and RMIT University; and
- Graph Representation Learning for Fair Teaming in Crisis Response – UCLA, The University of Texas at Austin, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Melbourne.
“As the world races towards new applications for technologies like AI, it will take global collaboration to champion responsible and ethical applications that embrace the full potential of technological advances and drive healthy competitive advantages,” Marshall added.
Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of NSF, said the CSIRO-NSF partnership is creating a platform to mobilise the resources and capabilities of the research communities across the United States and Australia, addressing areas of mutual priority between the two countries.
“With this collaboration also comes the opportunity to unlock our ‘missing millions’ – the untapped resource of those who are yet to be engaged for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce who can provide diverse thinking and ideas,” Panchanathan said.
This month, CSIRO joined as an anchor partner in the NSF Global Centres in Climate Change and Clean Energy, which involves the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
In Australia, initiatives for the Global Centres will focus on goals set by CSIRO, specifically those involving energy transition.
