Ma earns NSF CAREER award to create safety protocols for generative AI
Xiaolong Ma, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical, Computing, and Software Engineering, says the growing availability of generative AI models demands stronger guardrails.
ECSE assistant professor Xiaolong Ma won a five-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award to improve the images and media that AI models generate.
“Xiaolong’s outstanding work on scalable, efficient, and trustworthy artificial intelligence addresses a critical frontier in advancing AI, helping make increasingly powerful AI systems more practical, reliable and responsible,” said Michael Wu, Thomas R. Brown Leadership Chair and head of ECSE. “As one of the school’s AI experts, his success also highlights the growing strength and breadth of ECSE’s expertise in AI.”
The NSF CAREER grant, one of the agency’s most prestigious awards, honors early-career researchers who serve as academic role models and show leadership potential.
Ma has devoted much of his research to developing privacy-preserving, safe and controllable learning methods for generative models.
“This project represents an important step toward my long-term vision of building trustworthy and controllable generative AI,” he said.
His next tool will train AI algorithms to exclude harmful content without degrading performance.
“It focuses on developing machine unlearning techniques for diffusion models, enabling AI systems to selectively forget unwanted knowledge,” said Ma.