The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated AI2) is a research institute funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to achieve scientific breakthroughs by constructing AI systems with reasoning, learning, and reading capabilities. Oren Etzioni was appointed by Paul Allen in September 2013 to direct the research at the institute.
Aristo: A flagship project of AI2, inspired by a similar project called Project Halo carried out by Seattle-based artificial intelligence company Vulcan. The goal is to attempt to design computers that can pass school science examinations (4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade) after preparing for the examinations from the course texts and study guides. The focus of the project is explained by the guiding philosophy that artificial intelligence is about having a mental model for how things operate and refining that mental model based on new knowledge. It was found that computers could learn better from study guides than from ordinary textbooks because study guides offered information more directly and avoided metaphorical language and digressions.
Euclid: A project focused on understanding and solving mathematical word problems and diagram-based geometry problems. The project integrates both diagram understanding and natural language understanding and seeks to create state-of-the-art solvers for both problem types.
Plato: A ground-breaking research project on visual knowledge extraction that capitalizes on the wealth of information available in images. Project Plato aims to create knowledge bases composed entirely of information derived from images, both static and video.
Semantic Scholar: This project is a new service for scientific literature search and discovery, focusing on semantics and textual understanding. This search engine allows users to find key survey papers about a topic or to produce a list of important citations or results in a given paper. Semantic Scholar officially launched on November 2, 2015.
Launched in 2015, the institute's startup incubator will try to develop technologies in the artificial intelligence field.
AI2 was the subject of an in-depth article in The Verge. Its launch was covered in Xconomy, and GeekWire. Allen and Etzioni co-authored an article for CNN about artificial intelligence and AI2 in December 2013. AI2 has also been mentioned in other articles discussing the current state of and trends in artificial intelligence research.
