Giving AI geometric awareness allows it to better understand the world

Source Domain: news.ucsb.edu

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly vital to everyday activities across diverse sectors of society, from AI assistants to autonomous vehicles to healthcare. But the way these systems are trained doesn’t provide them with a conceptual framework like humans use to make sense of the world. This disconnect poses serious risks of failure and raises many concerns about AI use.

Professor Paul Atzberger’s group at UC Santa Barbara is tackling these challenges by developing new ways to incorporate common-sense knowledge about the world into AI systems. His recent work with graduate student Blaine Quackenbush has been focused on geometric understanding.

“We’re leveraging concepts from mathematics and differential geometry so these AI algorithms see the data as more than just a collection of floating points,” explained Atzberger, a professor of mathematics and mechanical engineering. “This provides awareness of the cohesive whole, with interconnected parts made up of edges, curved surfaces and other forms.”

The result is a more robust AI with applications across research and industry. They just released version 2.0 of an easy-to-use, open-source Python package. This can be found, along with a collection of technical papers, on the group’s GitHub page.

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