UB joins AI Alliance, a global group promoting safe artificial intelligence

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The University at Buffalo has joined AI Alliance, a newly formed international community of organizations dedicated to promoting open, safe and responsible artificial intelligence.

IBM and Meta – in collaboration with more than 50 members representing academia, startups, enterprises and scientific organizations – launched the initiative last December. AI Alliance announced an additional 28 members, including UB, earlier this month.

Jinjun Xiong, director of UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, said the alliance’s goals match those of UB, which is focused on harnessing AI for the betterment of society.

“The recent resurgent interest in AI is a clear demonstration of the power of open research and the close collaboration between industry and academia. UB is proud to be part of the AI Alliance as a founding member to achieve its noble goals of democratizing the access of AI through open innovation, and to ensure the advancement of AI will benefit everyone in our society in a safe, responsible, and equitable way,” he said.

In its Dec. 5 announcement, the alliance stated that it “is focused on fostering an open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation in AI while ensuring scientific rigor, trust, safety, security, diversity and economic competitiveness.”

It continued: “By bringing together leading developers, scientists, academic institutions, companies, and other innovators, we will pool resources and knowledge to address safety concerns while providing a platform for sharing and developing solutions that fit the needs of researchers, developers, and adopters around the world.”

Members include Yale University, Dell Technologies, Dartmouth University, Oracle, NASA, Simons Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, Sony Group, the National Science Foundation, among others.

Objectives of the alliance include:

• Develop and deploy benchmarks and evaluation standards, tools, and other resources that enable the responsible development and use of AI systems at global scale, including the creation of a catalog of vetted safety, security and trust tools. Support the advocacy and enablement of these tools with the developer community for model and application development.
• Responsibly advance the ecosystem of open foundation models with diverse modalities, including highly capable multilingual, multimodal, and science models that can help address societywide challenges in climate, education and beyond.
• Foster a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem by boosting contributions and adoption of essential enabling software technology.
• Support global AI skills building and exploratory research. Engage the academic community to support researchers and students to learn and contribute to essential AI model and tool research projects.
• Develop educational content and resources to inform the public discourse and policymakers on benefits, risks, solutions and precision regulation for AI.
• Launch initiatives that encourage open development of AI in safe and beneficial ways, and host events to explore AI use cases and showcase how alliance members are using open technology in AI responsibly and for good.

“UB has research that is in line with all these objectives, and that’s why UB is very excited to join the AI Alliance and contribute back to the community as our research matures,” said Xiong.