NTU student wins prestigious data science award for research on responsible AI

NTU, SCSE student, David Berend, won the Singapore Data Science Consortium research award 2020. The award recognises the ten most impactful Ph.D. students in Singapore in the field of data science. Under the supervision of Prof Liu Yang, David’s research focuses on standardisation and certification of trustworthy AI. 

Specifically, David’s research addresses the rapid growth of artificial intelligence in safety-critical areas in Singapore. This growth comes with risks towards security, privacy, fairness and interpretability. For example, a credit scoring application may be unfair towards gender, a disease detection system may leak highly sensitive information, or an autonomous driving system may have not been tested under all weather conditions leading to unsecure driving or accidents. Every new ungoverned incident risks slowing down adoption of AI.

To mitigate risks, standards and regulations are being developed, e.g. under the International Standards Organisation (ISO) or the European Commission. However, they are missing the defined quality measures these regulations should follow.

Throughout 20 months of pursuing his Ph.D., David discovered that out-of-distribution detection and generalization may enable granular quality measures to guide and verify responsible AI systems. 

Together with Prof Liu Yang, David now is contributing to the national AI committee on Secure AI in Singapore and acts as Singapore Delegate to the global international standards organisation (ISO) committee on Artificial Intelligence to integrate the verification potential in these regulatory developments. 

Thereby, these new research findings play an important role in contributing to future regulatory approaches leading to safeguarded and sustainable adoption of AI.

Link to award: https://sdsc.sg/?page_id=12274          
Link to research website: https://safe-intelligence.com/