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Secure AI technology to tackle “rapidly changing environments” gets the nod with funding drop from the Australian Defence Force.
The Australian Defence Force’s Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator’s Emerging and Disruptive Technologies program has awarded $3,220,633 in funding to the University of NSW to develop a “new generation of multimodal foundation models” or MFMs.
These are AI systems capable of collating information from multiple sources and interpreting the situation as circumstances rapidly change.
Project lead Professor Flora Salim of UNSW’s School of Computer Science and Engineering and deputy director (Engagement) at the UNSW AI Institute, said UNSW would be creating AI systems that can operate under challenging defence environments.
“We are working on building MFMs that can adapt to rapidly changing conditions, protect against attacks and manipulation, and handle emerging multimodal inputs and novel tasks,” Salim said in a January statement.
“By combining these inputs through advanced data fusion and data-efficient pretraining and post-training techniques, we will develop AI systems that continually learn and self-update, to provide a reliable understanding of complex situations.”
One vital element of the project will be creating new defences for multimodal IA, including being able to filter both input and output alongside adversarial training to help the system navigate hostile environments.
“This project underpins UNSW’s commitment to translating advanced research into outcomes that genuinely help our partners, whether they’re in academia, industry, government or the broader community,” said Professor Arcot Sowmya, head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Dr Sue Keay, director of UNSW AI Institute, said the project is proof of Australia’s growing sovereign AI capability.
“I’m proud to work with the chief investigators on this project, Prof Salim, Prof Salil Kanhere, Dr Rahat Masood and Dr Aditya Joshi, and their very talented teams,” Keay said.
“I look forward to watching their work integrated into critical ADF infrastructure.”
