Asger Horn Brorholt is a true native – he has a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at AAU and wrote his thesis on Shielded AI. He will continue this work as a Research Assistant in the DEIS group.
DESCRIBE YOUR RESEARCH AREA AND FOCUS
- I work on Shielded AI, which is a way of providing formal safety guarantees while benefiting from the optimized behaviour that machine learning - AI if you will - can provide. This is useful in places like self-driving cars, water control systems, nuclear power plants, or other sites where unsafe actions are potentially dangerous.
Here, shielding can be employed to provide safety guarantees by synthesizing a strategy to enforce some desired safety property.
This strategy should be as permissive as possible, such that the shield can intervene where the actions of a machine learning agent would lead to a safety violation while keeping as many options as possible open to the agent for optimizing the outcome.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO CONTINUE YOUR CAREER AT AALBORG UNIVERSITY?
- I have always been impressed with AAU's focus on real-world problems and collaboration with stakeholders and the industry. With the guidance and good example of my professors, supervisors and TAs, it has become an ambition of mine to stay in academia, so when I got this opportunity right here at AAU, I naturally agreed.
FUN AND OTHER FACTS?
- I greatly enjoy spending time in nature, as long as it doesn't involve spending the night there.