The Hybrid Intelligence Centre

Hybrid Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intellect

The Hybrid Intelligence Centre

Starting in March 2023, the Hybrid Intelligence Center will be looking to fill new PhD student and postdoc vacancies.

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. HI takes human expertise and intentionality into account when making meaningful decisions and perform appropriate actions, together with ethical, legal and societal values. Our goal is to design Hybrid Intelligent systems, an approach to Artificial Intelligence that puts humans at the centre, changing the course of the ongoing AI revolution.

By providing intelligent artificial collaborators that interact with people we strengthen our human capacity for learning, reasoning, decision making and problem solving. This interaction has the potential to amplify both human and machine intelligence by combining their complementary strengths. Hybrid Intelligence requires meaningful interaction between artificial intelligent agents and humans to negotiate and align goals, intentions and implications of actions. Developing HI needs fundamentally new solutions to core research problems in AI: current AI technology surpasses humans in many pattern recognition and machine learning tasks, it falls short on general world knowledge, common sense reasoning, and human capabilities such as collaboration,  adaptivity, responsibility and explainability (CARE). These challenges are being addressed in four interconnected research lines.

The Hybrid Intelligence Centre is a collaboration of top AI researchers from the VU Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, the TU Delft, and the Universities of Groningen, Leiden, and Utrecht, in areas such as machine learning, knowledge representation, natural language understanding & generation, information retrieval, multi-agent systems,  psychology, multimodal interaction, social robotics, AI & law and ethics of technology. The HI centre will create a national and international focus point for research on all aspects of Hybrid Intelligent systems.

“We define hybrid intelligence (HI) as the combination of human and machine intelligence, augmenting human intellect and capabilities instead of replacing them and achieving goals that were unreachable by either humans or machines.”

Z. Akata, D. Balliet, M. de Rijke, F. Dignum, V. Dignum, G. Eiben, A. Fokkens, D. Grossi, K. Hindriks, H. Hoos, H. Hung, C. Jonker, C. Monz, M. Neerincx, F. Oliehoek, H. Prakken, S. Schlobach, L. van der Gaag, F. van Harmelen, H. van Hoof, B. van Riemsdijk, A. van Wynsberghe, R. Verbrugge, B. Verheij, P. Vossen, and M. Welling, “A Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intellect With Collaborative, Adaptive, Responsible, and Explainable Artificial Intelligence,” IEEE Computer, vol. 53, iss. 08, pp. 18-28, 2020. doi:10.1109/MC.2020.2996587
Location

The Hybrid Intelligence Centre is headquartered in the New University Building at the campus of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, with working locations at all participating universities in Amsterdam (VU & UvA), Delft, Groningen, Leiden and Utrecht. The HI Centre will be a sustainable centre of excellence where researchers can meet, collaborate and use the shared laboratories and infrastructure, with a lasting impact on the research programmes of each of the participating universities.

The Hybrid Intelligence Center is funded by a 10 year Zwaartekracht grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.