Ottawa – The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) are pleased to announce the creation of the NSERC-CSE Research Community on Robust, Secure and Safe Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Dr David Lie of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto will lead the community, which includes 18 researchers from 4 Canadian universities: Toronto, Concordia, Waterloo and York. Dr. Lie’s project, “An End-to-End Approach to Safe and Secure AI Systems,” will receive $5.6M over 4 years through a joint funding opportunity offered by CSE and NSERC.
The community’s goals will be to research, develop and demonstrate solutions for AI-related issues, including:
- creating methods to train AI models in situations where reliable, labelled data is unavailable without relying on external, untrusted pre-trained foundation models
- developing techniques to ensure AI models are robust, fair and interpretable
- establishing guidelines for AI use to ensure regulatory compliance and support the auditing process
This is the first of 4 communities created as part of the NSERC-CSE Research Communities grants. Each community will focus on a different topic.