UMD to Lead New $20M NSF Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law and Society

The University of Maryland will lead a multi-institutional effort supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that will develop new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies designed to promote trust and mitigate risks, while simultaneously empowering and educating a public increasingly fascinated by the recent rise of eerily human-seeming applications like ChatGPT.

The NSF Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) unites specialists in AI and machine learning with social scientists, legal scholars, educators and public policy experts. The team will work with communities affected by the technology, private industry and the federal government to determine what trust in AI would look like, how to develop technical solutions for AI that actually can be trusted, and which policy models best create and sustain trust.

Funded by a $20 million award from NSF, the new institute is expected to transform the practice of AI development from one driven primarily by technological innovation to one that is driven by ethics, human rights, and input and feedback from communities whose voices have previously been marginalized.

Read the rest of the article in Maryland Today.