A National AI for Good Initiative
Summary
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models can solve well-specified problems, like automatically diagnosing disease or grading student essays, at scale. But applications of AI and ML for major social and scientific problems are often constrained by a lack of high-quality, publicly available data—the foundation on which AI and ML algorithms are built.
The Biden-Harris Administration should launch a multi-agency initiative to coordinate the academic, industry, and government research community to support the identification and development of datasets for applications of AI and ML in domain-specific, societally valuable contexts. The initiative would include activities like generating ideas for high-impact datasets, linking siloed data into larger and more useful datasets, making existing datasets easier to access, funding the creation of real-world testbeds for societally valuable AI and ML applications, and supporting public-private partnerships related to all of the above.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.
The federal government is responsible for ensuring the safety and privacy of the processing of personally identifiable information within commercially available information used for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems