Providence, R.I.-based Brown University will lead the AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants, an effort focused on creating a new generation of AI assistants for use in mental and behavioral health settings, according to a news release on July 29.
The institute — which is supported by a $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation — will bring together top researchers across the U.S. to ensure safety throughout development and deployment.
Though some states have raised concerns about AI’s role in mental health services and safety, researchers will focus on developing AI systems with the capability for “trustworthy, sensitive and context aware interactions with people,” according to the release. Using research on human and machine cognition, researchers will aim to create systems that will better understand a person’s behavioral health needs and provide safe, appropriate feedback to users.
“Any AI system that interacts with people, especially who may be in states of distress or other vulnerable situations, needs a strong understanding of the human it’s interacting with, along with a deep causal understanding of the world and how the system’s own behavior affects that world,” Ellie Pavlick, PhD, an associate professor of computer science at Brown who leads the initiative, said. “Mental health is a high stakes setting that embodies all the hardest problems facing AI today.”
The institute intends to address the growing need for mental health services and the lack of access due to insurance, social stigma and rising costs of living across the country.
“The work we’ll be doing on trust, safety and responsible AI will hopefully address immediate safety concerns with these systems — for example, developing safeguards against responses that reinforce delusions or unempathetic responses that could increase someone’s distress,” Dr. Pavlick said. “We need short-term solutions to avoid harms from systems already in wide use, paired with long-term research to fix these problems where they originate.”
The institute is one of five across the U.S. receiving a combined $100 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, in partnership with Capital One and Intel.
