Our mission:
Real AI for Real People in the Real World
Our goal in FCAI is to create new types of AI, which can operate with humans in the complex world, and to renew the Finnish industry with this new AI.
What do we mean by that?
Real AI
Real AI solutions will bring AI systems closer to human cognition. We do not attempt to replicate human cognition but provide ambitious and realistic technical solutions.
Real People
Real People will use AIs as companions and assistants – and AIs need guidance from people. AIs we create can interact with humans in ways that are understandable, trustworthy, and ethical.
Real World
For AIs to be able to perform efficiently in the Real World, they need to work with scarce data and in situations where large, labeled training data sets are rare.
Key objectives: data efficiency, trust & ethics, understandability
To create Real AI, we have set up three grand scientific objectives: data efficiency, trust & ethics, and understandability.
Present-day AI solutions work well only in a very small subset of simple domains. In order to expand the deployment of AI further, we need new tools that overcome the key shortcomings of current AI systems.
Data Efficiency
Current AI solutions can be very successful in domains where tasks are relatively simple and well-defined, and an abundance of high-quality, properly annotated data are available. Existing AI methods do not, however, easily extend to domains where such data are not available or are difficult or expensive to acquire. Real AIs will be able to work with real-world scarce data that is ill-defined, hard to acquire, or unavailable.
Trust & Ethics
We will create AIs that are secure, fair, give trustworthy results, preserve privacy, and whose use is ethically sustainable. We will develop the required privacy-preserving and secure methods to address challenges related to susceptibility to manipulation, information stealing and unethical approaches. We will provide new resilient deep learning approaches for the currently popular and successful deep neural networks.
Understandability
AI does not yet understand users. We need to open the “black box” of many AI methods: to understand how methods such as neural networks operate and what the uncertainties inherent in their output are. Modeling the user and interaction will help the AI understand the user and vice versa. The outcome will be AIs that are able to augment human capabilities in a multitude of tasks.
From fundamental research to high-impact
Artificial intelligence doesn’t exist in an academic vacuum. We promote AI that effectively benefits society and industry, and helps solve the real-life problems of real people.
The issues of data efficiency, trust & ethics, and understandability that artificial intelligence still faces in science, technology and society are also the keys for creating the new wave of the coming AI revolution.
FCAI connects pioneering expertise and top talents in academia with industry and the public sector to overcome these three bottleneck problems. The collaboration of a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines, business domains, and societal initiatives together with our impact actions will yield both concrete solutions for applying AI and scientific advances in fundamental AI development.
Together FCAI research and impact actions enable industrial renewal and promote the transformation of society through the effective and ethically responsible application of AI.