— By Emma Overmaat

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing our world. From diagnosing diseases to shaping business and finance; and from providing personalized learning to addressing climate change: AI technologies affect all aspects of human life and their impact will only  increase in the years to come.

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence provides a unified home for high-quality research in core and applied AI areas and features 8 specialty sections led by 12 prominent Chief Editors:

• Medicine and Public Health — Thomas Hartung (Johns Hopkins University)

• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence — Kristian Kersting (TU Darmstadt) and Sriraam Natarajan (UT Dallas)

• AI for Human Learning and Behavior Change — Julita Vassileva (University of Saskatchewan)

• Artificial Intelligence in Finance — Paolo Giudici (University of Pavia) and Jochen Papenbrock (Firamis)

• Fuzzy Systems — Enrique Herrera-Viedma (University of Grenada) and Francisco Chiclana (De Montfort University)

• AI in Business — Dursun Delen (Oklahoma State University)

• Language and Computation — Shlomo Argamon (Illinois Institute of Technology) and Sergei Nirenburg (Rensselaer Polytechnic University)

• Technology and Law — Radboud Winkels (University of Amsterdam)

Artificial Intelligence: a force for good

Harnessing the power of new technologies for good is one of our key challenges and the potential of these advances as well as their application to the world’s most pressing problems is immense. Julita Vassileva, Professor of Computer Science, mentions the recent voter behavior manipulation on Facebook by Cambridge Analytica as an evocative example: “Such cases have attracted a lot of public attention and raised justified fears of the unbounded power of Big Data and AI. However, the same technologies can be deployed to educate people about social media use and help them overcome their online addictions.”

Paolo Giudici, Professor of Data Science and Statistics, stresses the importance of explicable and accountable AI in making applications that benefit society: “AI can be a force for good in the financial world. It can improve user experience, make finance more inclusive, and improve financial sustainability. But algorithms must be made explicit and transparent to be understood, validated and monitored.”

Hollywood presents us with futuristic scenarios of AI robots taking over the world. AI technologies also have the power to help humanity overcome current global challenges. Kristian Kersting, Professor of Machine Learning, states: “The world needs more innovative approaches to protecting and improving crop yield, not least due to climate change and population growth. AI should play a major role.” For example, AI can augment agriculture and allow early detection of crop diseases, monitor health in livestock, and provide hyper-local weather forecasting.

Open Access to Accelerate Progress

With its broad scope, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence enables different research communities working on AI to come together and benefit from cross-fertilization, catalyzing further developments in AI.

Shlomo Argamon, Professor of Computer Science, and Sergei Nirenburg, Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science, highlight the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration in their field: “Research is at present largely fragmented – artificial intelligence researchers working on language understanding often don’t take into account what linguists know about how language works, and many linguists do not know about computational methods that could help them develop and test more detailed, precise, and meaningful theories to explain linguistic phenomena. We expect that by bringing scholars working in these separate fields together, we will raise the possibility of truly transformative discoveries.”

Research in AI core fields and applications is evolving quickly. Publishers need to ensure innovations are not outdated by the time they are published. Catering to this field, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence provides an efficient yet thorough peer-review process. Professor Julita Vassileva explains: “The current dominant publication model is in my view outdated. I want to try a new way of peer-review that is interactive, fast and responsive.”

From an Open Science perspective: “a solid open access model, interdisciplinarity, and a rigorous and streamlined peer-review process are key accelerators to research and debottlenecking scientific advances, and thus also chief factors for the rapid implementation of new and meaningful technologies that can carry us into a sustainable future,” says Dr. Felix Ohnmacht, Manager of Frontiers’ AI and Big Data portfolio. Frontiers’ Open Access policy means that all scientific innovations are instantly available to academics, policy-makers, industry, and indeed the public worldwide.

Future specialty sections scheduled for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence include a section on AI policy, governance, and social impact; and a section on AI in Agriculture (Chief Editor: Matthew McCabe, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology).

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence is now open for submissions and welcomes high-quality articles and Research Topic proposals on Artificial Intelligence and its various application areas.

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Frontiers journals have some of the highest citation rates. Among the world’s 20 largest publishers in 2017, Frontiers ranks 4th most-cited with an average of 3.65 citations per article.  In total, Frontiers articles have received more than 700,000 citations to date.