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Civil Engineering Faculty Receive NSF Award for Trustworthy AI in Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems
Posted on December 19, 2024
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) are transforming critical engineered infrastructure systems, such as transportation, promising connected and autonomous transportation services, networks, and systems. Despite their potential economic and societal benefits by addressing persistent traffic safety, congestion, and accessibility issues, AI-powered transportation CPS can also be a double-edged sword as they can cause intentional and/or unintentional harm to transportation system users, ultimately breaching public trust in and hindering mass adoption and derived benefits of transportation CPS. Alarmingly important examples are the unintentionally unreliable decisions of AI under complex uncertain situations arising in safety-critical autonomous driving, AI vulnerability to intentional adversarial attacks against transportation CPS elements, and unintentional discrimination of AI decisions against certain transportation CPS user groups. This project aims to develop novel and comprehensive trustworthy AI tools providing the umbrella addressing technical (specifically, AI safety and AI security) and social (specifically, AI fairness) trust issues arising in AI systems embedded in transportation CPS.
Mohamadhossein Noruzoliaee and Fatemeh (Noosheen) Nazari, Assistant Professors of Civil Engineering, join a multidisciplinary team to investigate “Trustworthy AI for Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems.” With a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its CISE MSI Expansion Program, the multidisciplinary team of eight distinguished faculty members from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Riverside will develop novel and comprehensive trustworthy AI tools at the nexus of AI safety, AI security, and AI fairness in the context of transportation CPS.