Volkswagen Foundation funds two AI projects at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development

December 15, 2020

With the initiative “Artificial Intelligence - Its Impact on Tomorrow's Society”, the Volkswagen Foundation is funding two projects involving scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The program is aimed at research projects that address the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence (AI) for society.

Scientists from the Center for Adaptive Rationality, together with colleagues from Northeastern University and the University of Bristol, are investigating how misinformation on large Internet platforms manipulates users and how a transparent information architecture can combat this.

The Max Planck Research Group iSearch, together with the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, is investigating how children explore their environment in order to program self-learning computer algorithms based on childlike curiosity. This could result in robots that exhibit learning behavior similar to that of children.

In total, the Volkswagen Foundation has provided funding for eight interdisciplinary and international research collaborations from the social and technical sciences that are dedicated to the field of tension between AI and society, for a total of around 12 million euros. With this initiative, the foundation is strengthening cross-disciplinary and cross-national research into the responsible further development of AI systems.

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