“FlyWire,” a Princeton-led team of scientists and citizen scientists, has now made a massive step toward understanding the human brain by building a neuron-by-neuron and synapse-by-synapse roadmap — scientifically speaking, a “connectome” — through the brain of an adult fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). 

“As of right now, it is unclear how to provide assurances that your model can’t be used for some harmful purpose, even if people can remove all your safeguards, and whether that’s even a tractable problem,” said Peter Henderson, an assistant professor at Princeton University with appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the School of Public and International Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. “We get into this gap between what’s currently technically possible and what policymakers might want.”

As a part of a broad set of investments around artificial intelligence, Princeton University has launched AI for Accelerating Invention, an initiative to achieve faster breakthroughs across engineering disciplines, including biomedicine, robotics and nuclear fusion.

Owen Travis, ’24, began playing Go in middle school after a friend took him to the Evanston Go Club in Illinois. In 2016, the AlphaGo computer program beat top player Lee Sedol at the strategy board game and Travis, who remembers reading about the defeat, found himself interested in the intersection of Go and machine learning.