Does the UAB dream with electric sheep?

Ovelles de la UAB pasturant davant la Facultat de Veterinària

We are probably the generation Jules Verne and Philip K. Dick dreamt about: being able to travel from the Earth to the Moon, journey thousands of leagues underseas, or discover secrets from the centre of the Earth. We have seen things our ancestors wouldn’t believe, yet our mood drops with a simple text message. We are constantly discussing technological advances and the risks they can pose to our civilisation.

21/06/2024

It is around Artificial Intelligence (AI) that many of those mixed feelings are centred, so it seems like a paradox when contrasted to the multitude of activities, new lines of research, and innovation projects related to this specific field of knowledge each year at the Esfera UAB.

The relationship between the Bellaterra Campus and AI is already a few decades old, prior to the two milestones one would consider foundational: the creation of the Institut d’Inverstigació en Intel·ligència Artificial (IIIA-CSIC) in 1994 and, the following year, the creation of the Centre de Visió per Computador (CVC), with different but complementary research lines. The first one is focused on foundational aspects of AI, such as logic, reason, automatic learning, and multiagent systems; the second one is focused on aspects applicable to the detection and interpretation of digital images. Both have emerged as national and international leaders in their fields, nourishing leading tech companies with talent.

These centres have not only collaborated amongst them from the very beginning, but the multidisciplinary nature of the Bellaterra Campus has allowed them to naturally connect in a lot of R&D projects in other areas of knowledge during all these years. Some of those are:

  • La Draga: a reconstruction, simulation, and immersion in a metaverse to experience life in a Neolithic village, coming from the knowledge at the Departament de Prehistòria de la UAB.
  • Interpretation of ancient musical scores with the Musicology Department to help preserve, catalogue, and disseminate these documents that go beyond the standard capabilities of OCR technologies.
  • dAIry 4.0, a European project with the participation of the Servei de Nutrició i Benestar Animal, is looking to improve farm management through AI, develop an advanced system to individually classify cows, and optimise the automated milking process.

Thanks to the research activity at the UAB Research Park, we have supported the creation and growth of different spinoffs that use AI technology and knowledge as part of their business value. Some areas where we have worked include monitoring the quality of environmental resources (Ctrl4Enviro), port logistics (AllRead), and perimetral security (Davantis), among others.

With the boom of generative tools, UAB has promoted work commissions, starting with teaching and, recently, with investigation. On May 16th, about fifteen members of the university community met to work on the following three questions: 

  • The current regulations of AI, where the ALI&R group (Artificial Legal Intelligence and Robotics) showed the uttermost importance of legal work that will be necessary to consider in all academic, labour, and social competition where AI is involved, to avoid living in a dystopia like that of the novels of Mr. Dick.
  • New interdisciplinary areas of work in AI: presenting projects to create an R&D ecosystem of musical events through the Cathedra UAB-Cruïlla (reinventing ephemeral cities); identifying cultural changes to face in adopting AI technology (as the care of the elderly by robots); and the improvement of animal welfare through the support of new AI tools. For example, a business within the UAB Research Park, AWEC, has a mooing translator.
  • The AI strategy at UAB must be interdisciplinary, collaborative, and responsible, and it must count on the participation of the UAB community together with its environment and be supported by its government team, the current one and the next ones.

The UAB Research Park is always there, from the different work fronts that connect an initiative with society to initiatives like the teaching programme AI applied to industry, AI4ALL, or the Linkage Programme with the Industry of the UAB-Cruïlla Chair, mentioned above.

Do we dream, at UAB, of electric sheep? Probably not. The intent behind this article has always been to show our transversal look at the development and application of AI, where all those possible areas that impact the knowledge of our research centres are articulated around our mission in society.

Therefore, we need a strategy where sustainability, ethics, inclusion, and accessibility have a place in a world where data trumps all our rights. At the end, we prefer AI helping us preserve these sheep that have accompanied us on campus for decades and, with them, ensure that the advancement of our civilisation remains an exciting, shared adventure for all.