New $20 m research centre hopes to “make computers more capable of understanding us”

A new national research centre at Adelaide will be established with $20 million in initial funding, and is geared to helping Australia capture some of the benefits of the current artificial intelligence revolution.   

The Centre for Augmented Reasoning will be based at at the University of Adelaide and will complement the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML, based at Lot 14) the university said in a statement. 

The seed investment of $20 million announced in Tuesday’s federal budget would be “a solid foundation for industry and government to build on, to ensure Australia captures the full benefits from the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution,” said the university’s interim Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mike Brooks.

The new centre’s director, Professor Anton van den Hengel, described augmented reasoning as removing some of the difficulties in dealing with technology, such as the language gap between humans and computers.   

“The goal of the Centre for Augmented Reasoning is to make computers more capable of understanding us, our instructions and needs, through more natural conversation,” van den Hengel explained.

“We want to enable machines to be able to discover new things in an ongoing partnership with humans, to understand our intent, and explain their actions.”

Picture: Adelaide Advertiser

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