Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the multidisciplinary research area that originated from the researches in Computer Science, but which for several years has pervaded every information technology discipline. It is currently considered one of the research areas with the greatest impact on economic development over the next 20 years and each industrialized nation has planned a multiannual strategic plan that contemplates it.
The DEIB has been active in the AI research since 1971 and today represents one of the few European research centres capable of combining the study of foundations (investigating algorithms and their properties), the study of methodologies and technologies (developing the tools for design and prototyping of AI applications and hardware technologies for their implementation and acceleration) and the development of applications in strategic and interdisciplinary sectors such as, for example: health, industry, economy and finance, telecommunications, security and mobility.
The strong skills in engineering, the experience and support of CEFRIEL (the limited liability consortium on ICT by Politecnico di Milano) and of organizations and companies make the DEIB a nerve center for technology transfer in AI.
In accordance with the national strategy for AI, the DEIB department will face three major challenges in the coming years:
- the development of new fundamental AI paradigms, particularly the ones oriented towards automatic data processing, nowadays considered the main engine for any AI application.
- the improvement of algorithms and technologies for those applications where today the state-of-the-art provides subhuman or par-human performance, in order to broaden the application range in which AI techniques are beneficial.
- the development of methodologies and applications that, through automatic approaches, allow rapid prototyping and customization, so as to make the diffusion of AI applications more pervasive.
Furthermore, we will also work on some application sectors considered strategic by the recent national plan of the MISE.
- The first sector concerns health, including biomedical applications, such as surgical robotics, movement analysis, diagnosis, assistive technologies, analysis of medical information in textual form, genomics and neuroscience. This sector will certainly receive even more attention in the coming years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The second sector is industry, including applications such as, for example, collaborative robotics, industrial quality control even with multispectral methods and monitoring.
- The third sector is economic transactions, including finance, commerce and marketing, with particular attention to the online world which will require innovative solutions to cope with the state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The fourth sector is smart cities and includes both mobility (with particular attention to autonomous vehicles) and transport and distribution networks for communication and energy, with the possibility of predicting traffic in 5G networks and allocating radio resources also in vehicle systems.
- The fifth sector concerns multimedia forensic applications, fake news detection and IT security, the importance of which nowadays is increasing thanks to the digitization growth in the country.
Expected impact on sustainable development goals in the areas: SDG2, SDG3, SDG7, SDG9, SDG11, SDG13 and SDG16.
