GRAND CHALLENGE #3 Promoting safety at the human-digital interface | 2022 Progress Report

Grand Challenge #3

Promoting safety at the human-digital interface

We are right now in the early stages of a technological revolution powered by digital intelligence. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have already begun to transform our understanding of disease and human biology; they help fly our planes, staff our companies, and enforce our laws; and experts say there is still more change to come.

We are also becoming familiar with problems in the digital ecosystem, from the erosion of privacy and the misuse of data to black box algorithms that quietly reinforce human biases. It is critical that we solve these problems while the technologies driving them are still nascent.

We aim to do just that, by developing new frameworks for digital safety in partnership with experts worldwide.

Protecting consumers from emerging digital threats

The Digital Safety Research Institute (DSRI) was launched in 2022 to address an array of safety risks and emerging threats in the digital ecosystem. Led by newly appointed Dr. Jill Crisman, DSRI aims to offer extensive outreach and education to help support safer digital environments for people everywhere. Because the creation of a safer digital ecosystem is a task too massive and complex for a single research group, DSRI also is committed to partnering with other organizations focused on digital safety — such as Northwestern University in Illinois, which collaborated with DSRI in 2022 to form the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) research hub.