Neuro-Symbolic AI
Toward Safer and Smarter AI
The Centaur AI Institute was established to achieve safe/reliable AI, with the hypothesis that an emerging set of “neuro-symbolic” ideas which incorporate both learning and knowledge/reasoning can provide the path toward resolving many if not most of the key issues preventing the use of AI in cannot-fail use cases such as in medicine, law, defense, transportation, financial systems, or conversational systems for performing transactions. More broadly, these issues are also fundamentally at the root of achieving greater capability and generality in AI. An upshot of these ideas is that new human-AI systems (“centaur AI” or human-in-the-loop systems) can be built where humans provide and interact with symbolic knowledge and are essential to AI rather than dispensible. The questions are both important enough and difficult enough to necessitate the formation of a new entity primarily motivated by the public good rather than profits, and insulated from the short-term motivations, timelines, and instabilities of even the largest industrial labs. As almost all other non-profit organizations addressing safe AI appear to be policy-focused rather than technically oriented, and almost all organizations addressing safe AI technically appear to be for-profit and focused on current mainstream technologies, we seek to fill the void rather than pursue either of those avenues.
The Institute is a 501(c)(3) whose mission is to illuminate the technical path to safer and more capable AI through fundamental research and advancing its adoption through education throughout the AI ecosystem. The Centaur AI Institute is funded through government research grants/contracts (e.g. NSF, DARPA, etc) and charitable donations by individuals, foundations or other organizations interested in helping to advance safe/reliable/neuro-symbolic AI. In particular the Institute can coordinate complex, multidisciplinary efforts which are otherwise difficult to put together and maintain on a long term basis. Specific activities include:
1. Research
A. Attacking open problems, toward safer and smarter AI. Centaur AI conducts research projects ultimately aimed at what it regards as the most pressing open problems of AI, with a particular emphasis on developing a family of techniques which can, among other things, achieve:
These properties can all be consider key aspects of safe AI, as well as of AI that can generally perform better. Examples of current practical open problems that can be addressed by this work:
Centaur AI research threads consider both long-term conceptual foundations needed to enable such systems as well as development of cutting-edge new systems for standard AI tasks such as classification (e.g. as is common in data science), sequence-to-sequence transduction (e.g. as is done by LLMs), and sequential decision making (e.g. as is done by robots). Current questions being investigated include:
B. Research events, toward connecting the community. Centaur AI organizes research events such as workshops for the exchange of research ideas and the building and strengthening of a community around neuro-symbolic AI/safe AI research.
C. Open-source software, toward accelerating the community. Centaur AI creates and contributes to open source implementations of neuro-symbolic/safe AI research ideas, to help accelerate research, and ultimately put working technology in the hands of practicing data scientists.
2. Education
A. Educational events and materials. One of the main obstacles to the development of neuro-symbolic ideas is the inherent difficulty in spanning two very large and very different intellectual traditions - that of statistical AI or machine learning (ML), and that of symbolic AI or knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) – most researchers are trained in one side but not the other. We hope to help onboard new researchers into this pursuit by providing educational entry points for researchers from both sides, via events with short courses and panels. We will also develop educational materials including presentations, courses, and books.
B. Guiding students. To help students interested in this emerging area (and indirectly their advisors), we can provide guidance on open problems to tackle and the history of approaches in the literature, as well as bring students into existing collaborations or start new research projects and otherwise make professional connections.
C. Advising organizations. To accelerate the development of the neuro-symbolic AI ecosystem, we advise organizations of all kinds on how to utilize neuro-symbolic AI technologies, including non-profits, government agencies, startups, venture capital and private equity firms, and large enterprises. Like many non-profit organizations, the Institute has a wholly-owned for-profit entity (Centaur AI Corporation) for the subset of its activities which further its mission but may also further the commercial interest of a third party - for example, advising companies on the use of neuro-symbolic technologies to advance their business. Similar to a university, we anticipate in the future helping to incubate startups based on neuro-symbolic technology, leveraging our past entrepreneurial experience.
Centaur AI has its own staff, a large network of close collaborators in academia (including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, Yale, Purdue, Univ Sao Paulo, etc) and elsewhere who can be funded by Centaur, and many collaborators with jobs at commercial entities who work on a volunteer basis. Centaur AI forms project teams spanning experts in:
Centaur AI is headquartered in California but operates via remote collaboration internationally. Centaur’s events are generally held virtually, with the exception of those that may be held as part of existing conferences such as workshops at AAAI and NeSy.
Education
For those seeking to learn more about neuro-symbolic AI including a crash course on basic concepts and a curated set of the most recent developments, see our resources above.
Research
New collaborators (researchers in academia or industry or government, graduate and undergraduate students, data scientists, engineers) are always welcome! All research by the Institute is collaborative and open, i.e. it works toward publications and open source software, aimed to advance the AI research community at large (only work performed in the Centaur AI Corporation subsidiary may be proprietary and any such work will be clearly identified as such and performed under appropriate contract).
Research is currently organized according to the following working groups:
Projects:
Operational and educational team
For those who want to help the Institute execute its mission and bring ideas for how to do it better, we welcome new members to the Operations team, which plans and creates our:
How we work
For some insight about our culture/style, here are is an incomplete list of some aspects (generally picked up through experience in or observation of other organizations):
Commercial
For ambitious startups and larger enterprises seeking to take advantage of the powerful technologies emerging from this next wave of AI, we have the industrial experience to help you learn more and assess whether your problem can be well addressed, and even help you execute a proof-of-concept project through to a deployed system.
Donations
For those who want to help the cause - bringing to life a new, better form of AI for humanity - your financial support will be greatly appreciated and recognized!
Contact
For any of these, contact Alexander Gray (alexander.gray “AT” centaurinstitute.org).