Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an area of strategic importance with potential to be a key driver of economic development. AI is also widely recognised as a technology with a strong social and economic impact. In order to assess present and future impact, there is a need to analyse what AI can achieve both currently and in the future. But, what is AI capable of? In this regard, and under the umbrella of the AI WATCH, the AICollaboratory is being created to monitor the impact and evolution of AI.
The AI collaboratory aims to develop a synergetic initiative for the analysis, evaluation, comparison and classification of AI systems. It is based on a thorough analysis of the requirements of the community, and a better understanding of the difficulties but possibilities of characterising both AI systems and tasks/challenges/problems in a more informative way to get a proper insight of what the systems are able to do (and how they achieve it) and what the problems are evaluating.
In a nutshell, the AI Collaboratory is being developed as a data-oriented instrument for collecting and organising results at the technical level (e.g., benchmarks, competitions, resources, etc.), and linked to the research meta-level (e.g., research production, activity) and the societal level (e.g., jobs, skills). Among other applications, the AI collaboratory can be used to perform in-depth (meta-)analyses and reviews using all the gathered data to structure and better understand the potential impacts and benefits of AI, the activity patterns or research dynamics, the characteristics and evolution of the AI landscape, etc.