The FBK Center on Augmented Intelligence

The FBK Research Center on Augmented Intelligence:

FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) is a non-profit, public research institute, internationally recognized for its pioneering research in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Over the course of nearly four decades, FBK has consistently maintained a leading position in the global landscape of AI research, encompassing areas such as Machine Learning, Automated Reasoning, Natural Language Processing, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, and Automated Planning. Furthermore, FBK is actively involved in implementing AI systems and technologies through numerous go-to-market projects across domains such as Health and Well-being, Digital Society, Digital Industry, and Digital Agriculture. These initiatives entail the development of AI-based applications benefiting tens of thousands of citizens. In this context, FBK has decided to do another step into the future of AI by opening a new center dedicated to Augmented Intelligence, with the objective of developing disruptively new research exploiting the existing long tradition of AI research and competences. 

Augmented Intelligence seeks to enhance human potential by combining the strengths of both human intelligence and AI. Its core objective is to leverage AI to empower and enhance human decision-making, problem-solving, and task accomplishment. In this perspective, Augmented Intelligence aims at cooperative autonomous systems that amplify and extend human capabilities. Augmented Intelligence is thus about creating systems able to understand humans and their cognitive, emotional, and social capabilities as well as the surrounding environment. It emphasizes interaction and collaboration between humans and machines to leverage the best of AI and human abilities. This integration entails incorporating AI technologies into various aspects of human life with the aim of bolstering human reasoning, learning, decision-making, performance, meaningful communication, and overall abilities, as well as creativity, self-awareness, and meta-cognitive capabilities across diverse domains. Augmented Intelligence plays a pivotal role in advancing critical aspects of our lives, including healthcare and well-being, the digital industry and manufacturing, education, the public sector, and digital society. 

Key research lines in Augmented Intelligence encompass:

• Foundational AI:  Novel theories and techniques for learning, reasoning, and acting, including continual learning and self-supervised learning, federated and efficient learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, neuro-symbolic models, hybrid models, the integration of data-driven and model-based inference, multi-modal perception, multi-modal content generation and understanding, geometric deep learning and graph neural networks, the integration of learning, perception, and acting in complex and dynamic environments.

• Human-AI Interaction. This line focuses on developing inclusive, unbiased, trustworthy, privacy-aware, sustainable multimodal foundation models (integrating language, vision, and speech) that can work in real world environments, as well as their integration with reasoning abilities, such as common sense, deductive reasoning, analogies, planning, counterfactuals, causal and temporal reasoning.  Human-AI interaction also requires a deep understanding of how attitudes toward AI affect users’ acceptance and appropriation of technology; above all, Augmented Intelligence demands for novel affect-aware mixed-initiative paradigms of interaction based on theory of mind, mental models, and other recent developments in cognitive science.

•  Cooperative and Social AI. This area explores how social rules/conventions affect interactions in multi-agent systems and how rules emerge from the behavior of interacting agents. It also includes social and cooperative AI systems that leverage social learning and social influence. Additionally, it involves developing cooperation frameworks of AI and human agents to create networks of AI and human agents that promote global fairness and social well-being.

•  Proactive ethical AI. Augmented Intelligence involves research not only concerned with how AI should not be used for the bad, but also with how it should be used to help promote positive values and to technically contrast antidemocratic and deceiving ones. 

The FBK Research Center on Augmented Intelligence carries on research toward sustainable techniques, this way reducing the carbon footprint deriving from their highly intensive use.

The FBK Research Center in Augmented Intelligence will comprise FBK research groups working in machine learning, natural language processing, dialogue technologies, speech recognition, human-computer interaction, computer vision, multi-modal perception, neurosymbolic techniques, data and knowledge representation and reasoning, data and process intelligence, neuroinformatics, cooperative and social AI.  The Center will benefit from the experience and scientific excellence of approximately 80 researchers and developers, including senior researchers, emerging talents, and doctoral students affiliated with these FBK research groups.

FBK is looking for a Director of this new Center: See the call

The primary objectives of the Director of the FBK Research Center in Augmented Intelligence will include:

•  Promoting and fostering new and challenging research directions that benefit from integrating various competencies within the Center. 

•  Promoting and implementing effective collaborations with the other centers of FBK, jointly identifying concrete, real-life use-cases to assess the Center’s results and solutions and promoting a wider adoption of Augmented Intelligences in different domains.  

• Fostering partnerships with other research centers, academic institutions, international organizations, and companies, thereby enhancing and strengthening FBK's scientific network.

• Attracting talent, including promising young researchers as well as experienced senior researchers. 

• In concertation with FBK’s governance, articulating the long-term mission of the Center sketched above into ambitious plans, including, external collaborations, access to funding, and stakeholder’s involvement.

• Managing, monitoring and reporting about the execution of annual plans, proposing amendments when appropriate.

• Promoting and supervising the Center’s publication strategy, contributing to build and increase its international reputation and visibility.

FBK will offer a range of research positions, including fixed-term contracts, tenure track opportunities, tenured positions, access to public funding dedicated to visionary and long-term research, as well as support for project proposal preparation and project management, along with access to high-quality computational resources.