Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor

S&T researcher examines if AI have a mind of their own

Most people encounter artificial intelligence (AI) every day in their personal and professional lives. Without giving it a second thought, people ask Alexa to add soda to a shopping list, drive with Google Maps and add filters to their Snapchat – all examples of AI use. But a Missouri University of Science and Technology researcher is examining what is considered evidence of AIs having a “mind,” which will show when a person perceives AI actions as morally wrong. 

Dr. Daniel Shank, an assistant professor of psychological science at Missouri S&T, is building on a theory that if people perceive entities to have a mind, that outlook will determine what moral rights and responsibility they attribute to it. His research would show when a person perceives AI actions as morally wrong and possibly serve to reduce smart device rejection and improve the devices.

“I want to understand the social interactions in which people perceive a machine to have mind and the situations they perceive it to be a moral agent or victim,” says Shank.

Shank’s behavioral science work applies the theory to advanced machines such as AI agents and robots. 

“The times when we do perceive a mind behind the machine tells us something about the technologies, their capacities and their behaviors, but they ultimately reveal more about us as humans,” Shank explains. “In these encounters, we emotionally process the gap between nonhuman technologies and having a mind, essentially feeling our way to machine minds.”

Shank is in the middle of a three-year project, funded by the Army Research Office (ARO), to better understand people’s perception of AI. ARO is an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory.

In his first year of research, he collected qualitative descriptions of the personal interactions people had with AIs that either involved a moral wrong or involved the person perceiving the AI to have “a lot of mind.” Shank’s research found that 31 percent of respondents reported exposure of personal information and 20 percent reported exposure to undesirable content – both of which Shank argues are reported due to their frequent occurrence on personal and home devices.

“Dr. Shank’s work is generating new understandings of human-agent teaming by systematically integrating longstanding social psychological theories of cognition and emotion with research on human-agent interaction,” says Dr. Lisa Troyer, program manager for social and behavioral sciences at the ARO. “His research is already generating scientific insights on the role of moral perceptions of autonomous agents and how those perceptions impact effective human-agent teaming.”

Currently in his second year of the research, he is conducting controlled experiments where the level of mind in the AI is varied and then the AI is the perpetrator or victim of a moral act. Shank hopes this will allow him to draw more direct comparisons between AI and humans. So far, his research finds that while some AIs such as social robots can assume greater social roles, human acceptance of an AI in those roles enhanced both perception of mind and emotional reactions.

The final phase of his research will use surveys and simulations to understand if levels of morality can be predicted by the impressions people have of the AI. 

“Technologies connected with the web, trained on big data and operating across social networking platforms are now commonplace in our culture,” says Shank. “These technologies, whether they are proper artificial intelligence or not, are routine in people's personal lives, but not every use of these technologies causes us to see them as having a mind.”

The question of whether virtue or vice can be attributed to AI still depends on if humans are willing to judge machines as possessing moral character. And as research into AI ethics and psychology continues, new subjects are being considered such as AI rights and AI morality.

New gravitational-wave model can bring neutron stars into even sharper focus

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor

Gravitational-wave researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a new model that promises to yield fresh insights into the structure and composition of neutron stars.

The model shows that vibrations, or oscillations, inside the stars can be directly measured from the gravitational-wave signal alone. This is because neutron stars will become deformed under the influence of tidal forces, causing them to oscillate at characteristic frequencies, and these encode unique information about the star in the gravitational-wave signal.

This makes asteroseismology -- the study of stellar oscillations -- with gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars a promising new tool to probe the elusive nature of extremely dense nuclear matter.

Neutron stars are the ultradense remnants of collapsed massive stars. They have been observed in the thousands in the electromagnetic spectrum and yet little is known about their nature. Unique information can be gleaned through measuring the gravitational waves emitted when two neutron stars meet and form a binary system. First predicted by Albert Einstein, these ripples in spacetime were first detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. The results from a numerical relativity simulation of two merging neutron stars similar to GW170817.{module INSIDE STORY}

By utilizing the gravitational wave signal to measure the oscillations of the neutron stars, researchers will be able to discover new insights into the interior of these stars. The study is published in an academic journal.

Dr. Geraint Pratten, of the University of Birmingham's Gravitational Wave Institute, is the lead author of the study. He explained: "As the two stars spiral around each other, their shapes become distorted by the gravitational force exerted by their companion. This becomes more and more pronounced and leaves a unique imprint in the gravitational wave signal.

"The tidal forces acting on the neutron stars excite oscillations inside the star giving us insight into their internal structure. By measuring these oscillations from the gravitational-wave signal, we can extract information about the fundamental nature and composition of these mysterious objects that would otherwise be inaccessible."

The model developed by the team enables the frequency of these oscillations to be determined directly from gravitational-wave measurements for the first time. The researchers used their model on the first observed gravitational-wave signal from a binary neutron star merger - GW170817.

Co-lead author, Dr. Patricia Schmidt, added: "Almost three years after the first gravitational-waves from a binary neutron star were observed, we are still finding new ways to extract more information about them from the signals. The more information we can gather by developing ever more sophisticated theoretical models, the closer we will get to reveal the true nature of neutron stars."

Next-generation gravitational wave observatories planned for the 2030s, will be capable of detecting far more binary neutron stars and observing them in much greater detail than is currently possible. The model produced by the Birmingham team will make a significant contribution to this science.

"The information from this initial event was limited as there was quite a lot of background noise that made the signal difficult to isolate," says Dr. Pratten. "With more sophisticated instruments we can measure the frequencies of these oscillations much more precisely and this should start to yield some really interesting insights."

Australian researchers record world's fastest internet speed from a single optical chip

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor

Researchers from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities have successfully tested and recorded Australia's fastest internet data speed, and that of the world, from a single optical chip - capable of downloading 1000 high definition movies in a split second.

Published in an academic journal, these findings have the potential to not only fast-track the next 25 years of Australia's telecommunications capacity, but also the possibility for this home-grown technology to be rolled out across the world.

In light of the pressures being placed on the world's internet infrastructure, recently highlighted by isolation policies as a result of COVID-19, the research team led by Dr. Bill Corcoran (Monash), Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell (RMIT) and Professor David Moss (Swinburne) were able to achieve a data speed of 44.2 Terabits per second (Tbps) from a single light source.

This technology has the capacity to support the high-speed internet connections of 1.8 million households in Melbourne, Australia, at the same time, and billions across the world during peak periods. {module INSIDE STORY}

Demonstrations of this magnitude are usually confined to a laboratory. But, for this study, researchers achieved these quick speeds using existing communications infrastructure where they were able to efficiently load-test the network.

They used a new device that replaces 80 lasers with one single piece of equipment known as a micro-comb, which is smaller and lighter than existing telecommunications hardware. It was planted into and load-tested using existing infrastructure, which mirrors that used by the NBN.

It is the first time any micro-comb has been used in a field trial and possesses the highest amount of data produced from a single optical chip.

"We're currently getting a sneak-peak of how the infrastructure for the internet will hold up in two to three years' time, due to the unprecedented number of people using the internet for remote work, socializing and streaming. It's really showing us that we need to be able to scale the capacity of our internet connections," said Dr. Bill Corcoran, co-lead author of the study and Lecturer in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University.

"What our research demonstrates is the ability for fibers that we already have in the ground, thanks to the NBN project, to be the backbone of communications networks now and in the future. We've developed something that is scalable to meet future needs.

"And it's not just Netflix we're talking about here - it's the broader scale of what we use our communication networks for. This data can be used for self-driving cars and future transportation and it can help the medicine, education, finance, and e-commerce industries, as well as enable us to read with our grandchildren from kilometers away."

To illustrate the impact optical micro-combs have on optimizing communication systems, researchers installed 76.6km of 'dark' optical fibers between RMIT's Melbourne City Campus and Monash University's Clayton Campus. The optical fibers were provided by Australia's Academic Research Network.

Within these fibers, researchers placed the micro-comb - contributed by Swinburne University, as part of a broad international collaboration - which acts like a rainbow made up of hundreds of high-quality infrared lasers from a single chip. Each 'laser' has the capacity to be used as a separate communications channel.

Researchers were able to send maximum data down each channel, simulating peak internet usage, across 4THz of bandwidth.

Distinguished Professor Mitchell said reaching the optimum data speed of 44.2 Tbps showed the potential of existing Australian infrastructure. The future ambition of the project is to scale up the current transmitters from hundreds of gigabytes per second towards tens of terabytes per second without increasing size, weight, or cost.

"Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fiber links with minimal cost," Distinguished Professor Mitchell said.

"Initially, these would be attractive for ultra-high-speed communications between data centers. However, we could imagine this technology becoming sufficiently low cost and compact that it could be deployed for commercial use by the general public in cities across the world."

Professor Moss, Director of the Optical Sciences Centre at Swinburne University, said: "In the 10 years since I co-invented micro-comb chips, they have become an enormously important field of research.

"It is truly exciting to see their capability in ultra-high bandwidth fiber optic telecommunications coming to fruition. This work represents a world-record for bandwidth down a single optical fiber from a single chip source, and represents an enormous breakthrough for part of the network which does the heaviest lifting. Micro-combs offer enormous promise for us to meet the world's insatiable demand for bandwidth."