Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy

The Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA) is a division of Johns Hopkins University located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The goal of the IAA is to ensure the safe, secure, reliable, and predictable integration of autonomous systems into society through its status as a national center of excellence. The IAA operates across three pillars of research: Technology, Ecosystem, and Ethics & Governance.

History

The Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA) was established in 2019. The IAA is run jointly by the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The Institute is based out of the historic Stieff Silver Building located in Baltimore, Maryland's Hampden area adjacent to Wyman Park. The former Stieff factory building was built by Stieff Silver in 1924 and was expanded in 1929 and 1971, and was converted into an office building, but the exterior has remained unchanged. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ed Schlesinger, Benjamin T. Rome Dean, Whiting School of Engineering, shared that "In the not too distant future we will see more and more autonomous systems operating with humans, for humans, and without humans, taking on tasks that were once thought of as the exclusive domains of humans. How can we as individuals and as a society be assured that these systems are design for resilience against degradation or malicious attack? The  mission of the Institute is to bring assurance to people so that as our world is populated by autonomous systems they are operating safely, ethically, and in the best interests of humans."

Ralph Semmel, Director of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, stated "In recent years, we have learned that the most important element about autonomous systems is - for humans - trust. Trust that the autonomous systems will behave predictably, reliably, and effectively. That sort of trust is hard-won and takes time, but the centrality of this challenge to the future of humanity in a highly autonomous world motivates us all."

Leadership

The IAA is lead by Executive Director Dr. James Bellingham. Dr. Bellingham was appointed to his position as Executive Director in early 2021 after leaving his position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he was the founding director of the Consortium for Marine Robotics since 2014.

Pillars

The IAA focuses on three main pillars of assured autonomy: technology, ecosystem, and ethics and governance. These three pillars support the goals of assured autonomy by ensuring that autonomous systems will be trusted to operate as expected, respond safely to unexpected inputs, withstand corruption by criminals or adversaries, and integrate seamlessly into society. By conducting research in the convergence of these areas, the IAA endeavors to bring us closer to assuring the future autonomous world.

• Technology: Autonomous systems perform tasks with a high degree of autonomy and often employ artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate human cognition, intelligence, and creativity. Advancements in research and engineering methodologies are needed to ensure they behave in safe, reasonable, and acceptable ways. Autonomous systems must perceive, decide, act, and learn as intended, cause no harm externally, and not be vulnerable to malicious interference. Some autonomous systems learn from their experiences, and they modify their own logic to achieve better results, and improve their capabilities. As a result, AI systems cannot be tested explicitly for all possible circumstances, yet these systems are expected to perform reasonably in all circumstances. New techniques are needed to ensure AI-enabled autonomous systems function as intended and explain their actions and conclusions. Additionally, new techniques are needed to ensure autonomous systems are resilient and resistant to attacks. Autonomous algorithms must be repeatable, verifiable, and unbiased. Assurance is achieved when the algorithms work in a repeatable and verifiable fashion without unintended biases in all the contexts for which they were designed to operate.
• Ecosystem: Autonomous systems must integrate well with individuals and with society at large. Autonomous ecosystems - the connections and interactions between autonomous systems, over networks, with the physical environment, and with humans - must be assured, resilient, productive, and fair in the autonomous future. Systems engineering is critical for ensuring the operational success for which the autonomous systems were intended. The full systems engineering life cycle must be addressed in the context of autonomous systems. Hardware, software, and algorithms must sustain the intended processing workload and data storage needs under a variety of conditions. Communications between systems and their interoperability must support highly dynamic interactions and enable cooperation and teaming across humans and systems. The technology must be architected for resiliency, extensibility, and evolution as increasing levels of autonomy place new demands on underlying infrastructures. New human-system engineering techniques are needed to ensure autonomous systems will be smoothly and readily adopted into society.
• Ethics and Governance: The nation must adopt the right policy to ensure autonomous systems benefit society. As the pace of technological advances continues to increase, ethics and governance must evolve simultaneously with the evolution of technology to ensure autonomous systems will serve to improve lives. Ethics and governance are essential to ensuring the adoption of autonomous systems into the greater society. It is difficult to overestimate the ramifications that autonomous systems will have on society. People are concerned about the potential dangers of these systems and want to be assured they will behave legally, ethically, fairly, and transparently.

Domains

The IAA enables research and translation on new assurance approaches for autonomy across various arenas, including three main relevant research areas for the future of autonomy: transportation, public safety and emergency response, and health systems.

• Transportation
• Public Safety and Emergency Response
• Health Systems

References

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