UTS debuts AI centre

The University of Technology (UTS) has launched a centre for artificial intelligence that it says will create intelligent machines with greater capacity for perception, learning and reasoning.

The university is building five dedicated labs which focus on: decision systems and e-service intelligence; computational intelligence and brain computer interfaces; robotics, knowledge infrastructure; and data science and knowledge discovery.

UTS’ deputy vice-chancellor research professor, Glenn Wightwick, said the the Centre of Artificial Intelligence (UTS:CAI) lets the university explore beyond core technology and into the impact of its discoveries.

“This includes the ethics of artificial intelligence, such as interrogating the way it will impact the future of work; and moral decisions we will need to explore around developments such as driverless vehicles,” he said.

Centre director, distinguished professor, Jie Lu, said the CAI will help the university position itself as a leader in research excellence in AI and become a research hub in the field through collaboration and teaching.

CAI research has led to significant impacts in academia and industry, developing systems for governments, industry partners, and research institutions, the university said.

Centre co-director, CT Lin, said these systems include data mining platforms for recommendations and user modelling, question answering, large scale information retrieval systems, intelligent vision systems for efficient video and image retrieval, detection and indexing.

“Our researchers consistently place top of many international competitions in image, video and multimedia analytics ,” Lin said.