During the MPhil studies, I will conduct research with a comparative analysis of current AI systems of animacy, physiological and biological vulnerability of living beings and compare it to neurobiological human data. Using human visuo-semantic neuroimaging datasets, I will integrate the sensory representations of the human brain into AI systems and test their alignment. I am to produce neuroscientifically based learning algorithms that can perceive the fragility of biological organisms and the precipice of animacy (livingness) of different entities: humans, animals, insects, and other organisms.
The research will be carried out at Prof. Kamila Jozwik’s lab at the University of Cambridge. Prof. Jozwik specializes in biologically-inspired deep learning and AI models. My previous research includes studies of human-machine interactions and the usage of AI chatbots in mental health. In this study, I saw that AI is not ready yet to fully understand the emotional spectrum and sometimes even physiological boundaries of humans. It inspired me to conduct the proposed research on AI’s concept of animacy and contribute research findings on how neuroscience can help us build more empathetic and intelligent AI systems.
The research will be conducted within 12 months, where the first 9 months will be for full-time work on the research. The last 3 months will be for writing AI design frameworks for tech companies based on the results of the experience and sharing them with the AI safety community through the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge.
The end goal of the project is to develop guidelines for biological validation of AI models and publish them open-source.