FAIR – Future Artificial Intelligence Research: Advancing AI Systems for Automation

FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research) is a nonprofit foundation aimed at implementing funded interventions within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Enhancing Artificial Intelligence:

The mission of the FAIR project is to advance artificial intelligence systems capable of:

1. Interacting and collaborating with humans.
2. Recognizing and operating within evolving domains.
3. Being aware of their limitations and adapting to new contexts.
4. Appropriately interacting in complex social situations.

Ten Principles for Future AI:

FAIR will work to increase the potential of future AI, based on ten principles:

1. Human-centric: AI that co-evolves with humans, both individually and collectively.
2. Integrative: Creating a bridge between different AI methods, technologies, disciplines, and skills.
3. Resilient: Operating in challenging, noisy, and uncertain real-world contexts.
4. Adaptive: Perceiving, learning, and acting in dynamically changing environments.
5. High-quality: Delivering applications with high-risk, high-precision, and safety requirements.
6. Symbiotic: Promoting effective human-machine interaction and collaboration.
7. Edge/Exascale: Applications operating at the infinitely small on the edge and the infinitely large on the cloud.
8. Pervasive: Ubiquitous AI operating in various social contexts.
9. Ecological: Considering the environmental dimension “by-design” in AI applications.
10. Sustainable and Biocognitive: Mimicking the principles of biological systems at multiple scales.

The FAIR Project and Spokes:

The FAIR project brings together 350 researchers and is divided into 10 Spokes, geographically distributed across different regions of Italy. Each Spoke addresses a different aspect of AI, such as sustainability, integration, security, and reliability.

The Spokes will open opportunities for both large companies and SMEs outside the partnership, acting as catalysts for the development of new AI technologies and services.

Transversal Projects:

In addition to the individual Spokes, seven transversal projects will accompany them:

1. Legal and Ethical Design of Reliable AI Systems: Investigating the creation of responsible and reliable AI systems “by-design,” “in-design,” and “for designers.”
2. Vision, Language, and Multimodal Challenges: Researching the creation of AI agents capable of perceiving complex real-world environments through multiple combined modalities (text, speech, images, videos, etc.).
3. Learning and Reasoning from Individuals to Communities to Society: Focusing on creating AI agents that integrate learning and reasoning to assist decision-making at multiple scales (individual and social).
4. Adjustable Autonomy and Embodied Physical Intelligence: Developing autonomous AI systems that understand the limits of their autonomy and seek human supervision when necessary.
5. TP5 and TP6: Exploring the frontiers of machine learning, utilizing mathematical and physical methods to understand why and when machine learning works and expanding the boundaries of “permanent,” continuous, incremental learning and meta-learning (learning to learn).
6. AI and Data-Centric Infrastructures: Addressing the management, preparation, and curation of large-scale, high-quality data for AI development.

Partnership Objectives:

The partnership with this research activity aims to:

1. Position Italy among the leading countries in AI research and innovation.
2. Overcome the current fragmentation of AI research.
3. Establish a human-centric, reliable, and sustainable AI.
4. Promote AI innovation and technological development.
5. Create and attract AI professionals to Italy.

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