AccelNet-Design: Accelerating Research Collaboration on Artificial and Natural Intelligences (ARCANI)

About This Grant

The fields that study mind and cognition are flourishing. Cognitive science has blossomed. Our understanding of animal minds has radically expanded. AI research has blazed past longstanding milestones like playing Go or writing credible essays. These fields study the same phenomenon—intelligence—in diverse forms, both natural and artificial. But they remain siloed, and each lacks a coherent foundation. This is most glaring in AI, where our capacity to engineer powerful AI systems has vastly outpaced our capacity to understand them. By building dialogue between the major disciplines studying natural and artificial intelligences, our project will produce a roadmap for Accelerating Research Collaboration on Artificial and Natural Intelligences (ARCANI). To create this roadmap, ARCANI will link several international research networks, drawing on insights and conversations that cross disciplines, career stages, and countries. The integration of these research networks will also help diversify participation in the study of natural and artificial intelligences. It will train a cohort of early career researchers in new ways of doing science and international collaboration. Through the existing Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, the ARCANI team has an excellent record of fostering collaboration and leadership amongst researchers from underrepresented groups and developing nations. ARCANI allows us to scale up our efforts, improving training, collaboration opportunities, and skill development for young scholars across many disciplines. The ARCANI roadmap will lead to the development of theoretical foundations spanning from animal behavior to AI. It will establish a vibrant trading zone for sharing novel methods, data, and computational frameworks. And it will translate foundational concepts and empirical insights into practical technologies. These interdisciplinary efforts are poised to transform the ways humans think about the environment, interact with computer systems, and build AI to support science, art, and human endeavors more broadly. Such outcomes will enhance US scientific leadership in many critical lines of research. Our Network of Networks brings together researchers from the biological, cognitive, social, and computer sciences to develop new approaches to Accelerating Research Collaboration on Artificial and Natural Intelligences (ARCANI). ARCANI aims to break down disciplinary silos and develop a comprehensive framework for exploring human, animal, and machine intelligences. We will link networks in ethology, complexity science, comparative cognition, neuroscience, robotics, and AI, with nodes in every habitable continent. We have identified three promising areas for accelerated advance through network-to-network collaboration: (1) theoretical foundations of intelligence (DEFINE); (2) leveraging the data revolution to redesign the study of cognition (DESIGN); and (3) naturalistic approaches to AI and robotics (DEPLOY). Each area will be explored by a cross-network working group, holding several virtual meetings and one in-person meeting. Early career researchers (ECRs, including grad students and postdocs) will play a prominent role; the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) will help recruit diverse and exceptionally gifted ECRs. Working groups will address three questions: WHAT are the gaps in existing knowledge? WHO in their networks is best positioned to come together to address them? HOW can AccelNet support sustainable international collaboration to close those gaps? These questions will drive surveys of existing research, definition of key concepts, and frank assessment of barriers. Working groups will summarize their findings in white papers, which we will publish as agenda-setting documents. Working group members will join the leadership team in crafting a 2024 Implementation proposal, providing a roadmap toward transformational cross-network collaboration on the foundations and applications of research on artificial and natural intelligences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.