5 RA Positions: AI Secure and Explainable by Construction

Project Description: 

AI applications have become pervasive: from mobile phones and home appliances to stock markets, autonomous  cars, robots, and drones. Each application domain comes with a rich set of requirements such as legal policies, safety and security standards, company values, or simply public perception. AISEC aims to build a sustainable, general purpose, and multidomain methodology and development environment for policy-to-property secure and explainable by construction development of complex AI systems.

This project will employ types with supporting lightweight verification methods (such as SMT solvers) in order to create and deploy a novel framework for documenting, implementing and developing policies for complex deep learning systems.  Types will serve as a unifying mechanism to embed security and safety contracts directly into programs that implement AI. The project will produce an integrated development environment with infrastructure to cater for different domain experts: from lawyers and security experts to verification experts and system engineers designing complex AI systems. It will be built, tested and used in collaboration with industrial partners in two key AI application areas: autonomous vehicles and natural language interfaces (aka chatbots). 

The project spans several subjects: type theory, automated and interactive theorem proving, security, AI and machine learning, autonomous systems, natural language processing and generation, legal aspects of AI. It will cover two main application areas: autonomous cars and chatbots, drawing from expertise and infrastructure provided by industrial partners working in these two areas. AISEC has a significant international span, with 12 partners from Academia and Industry in Europe (France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway) and the US. Researchers joining this project will have excellent opportunities to travel to international conferences, organise scientific events, spend time with industrial partners, collaborate with academic leaders in the field, develop their own research profiles as well as gain experience in other AI and CS disciplines.