Sarah Dean, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has received an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship from Schmidt Sciences.
Dean will receive the funding over two years to support her efforts to develop tools that prevent unanticipated negative consequences of large-scale AI systems, like chatbots and personal recommendation systems.
"I'm thrilled to receive this award, both for the research it will enable me to carry out with my students and postdocs, and because I'm excited to join such an impressive cohort of AI2050 fellows," Dean said.
Schmidt Sciences' AI2050 program invites scientists to imagine a world in the year 2050, in which AI has helped solve global challenges and benefited humanity. Their Early Career Fellows program supports researchers who are working to develop exactly these kinds of AI applications, especially those that are ambitious, multidisciplinary, and difficult to fund. Dean is among 20 Early Career Fellows selected this year.
For this project, Dean will create tools that anticipate, detect, and intervene in situations where AI systems have the potential to create harm, such as addiction or radicalization. She will draw from control theory, a branch of applied mathematics that uses feedback to control the behavior of a system to achieve a desired goal, and causal inference, a set of methods to determine if an observed association is a cause-and-effect relationship.
In her larger research work, Dean focuses on the interplay between optimization, machine learning, and dynamics in real-world systems. Ultimately, she hopes to establish guardrails that will result in more safe, secure, and robust AI systems that will be worthy of public trust.
Dean's work has received best paper awards at the International Conference on Machine Learning and the NeuRIPS Joint Workshop on AI for Social Good, and a best paper finalist award at the Conference on Robot Learning. She earned her doctorate and masters degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a Berkeley Fellowship and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
By Patricia Waldron, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.