With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), computer science and engineering alumnus Edward Kim ’13 PhD seeks to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) framework to mimic and model human intelligence and behavior.
Kim, who is an assistant professor of computing sciences at Villanova University and an expert in computer vision, was recently awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF, providing nearly half a million dollars to fund his research over a five-year period.
According to a Villanova press release, Kim’s work aims to take “deep learning,” a machine learning technique, to a new level. He will explore a novel kind of AI framework that mimics how the human brain senses and understands the world, utilizing a type of computer chip that communicates information in the same way that neurons in the brain communicate
“This biologically-inspired approach can learn robust representations of the world, without human intervention or supervision,” Kim says. “Our model learns about the physics of the world, it learns how to associate concepts together and can even predict future events without explicitly being told to do so. Ultimately, we believe that our research could be a plausible building block to an artificial intelligence that has a better understanding of the world in which we live.”
Kim will collaborate with researchers from the University of Delaware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, and Intel Corporation.
