Nisar Ahmed was interviewed for a new feature in Aerospace America magazine.
A publication of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the Q&A article discusses challenges and opportunities in artificial intelligence and machine learning for aerospace systems.
Ahmed is an associate professor of aerospace and Smead Faculty Fellow at CU Boulder and an expert in collaborative human and autonomous robot vehicle systems. He is also the CU Boulder director for the Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing, a multi-university National Science Foundation Initiative.
In the article, he outlined difficulties faced by researchers as they seek to design AI systems that can understand situations that come easily to human operators.
"When we talk about autonomy, we mean the ability to make your own decisions, usually under uncertainty or without complete information, and being able to intelligently respond to the circumstances and situations around you. The problem is that these meanings are very fuzzy and flexible to us as people, and we know what we mean when we say that, but when you tell the computer, you have to tell it exactly what to do in those situations," Ahmed said.