Using photos or videos, these AI systems can conjure simulations that train robots to function in physical spaces

University of Washington

Researchers working on large artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT have vast swaths of internet text, photos and videos to train systems. But roboticists training physical machines face barriers: Robot data is expensive, and because there aren’t fleets of robots roaming the world at large, there simply isn’t enough data easily available to make them perform well in dynamic environments, such as people’s homes.

Some researchers have turned to simulations to train robots. Yet even that process, which often involves a graphic designer or engineer, is laborious and costly.

Two new studies from University of Washington researchers introduce AI systems that use either video or photos to create simulations that can train robots to function in real settings. This could significantly lower the costs of training robots to function in complex settings.

In the first study, a user quickly scans a space with a smartphone to record its geometry. The system, called RialTo, can then create a “digital twin” simulation of the space, where the user can enter how different things function (opening a drawer, for instance). A robot can then virtually repeat motions in the simulation with slight variations to learn to do them effectively. In the second study, the team built a system called URDFormer, which takes images of real environments from the internet and quickly creates physically realistic simulation environments where robots can train.

The teams presented their studies — the first on July 16 and the second on July 19 — at the Robotics Science and Systems conference in Delft, Netherlands.

“We’re trying to enable systems that cheaply go from the real world to simulation,” said Abhishek Gupta, a UW assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and co-senior author on both papers. “The systems can then train robots in those simulation scenes, so the robot can function more effectively in a physical space. That’s useful for safety — you can’t have poorly trained robots breaking things and hurting people — and it potentially widens access. If you can get a robot to work in your house just by scanning it with your phone, that democratizes the technology.”

While many robots are currently well suited to working in environments like assembly lines, teaching them to interact with people and in less structured environments remains a challenge.

“In a factory, for example, there's a ton of repetition,” said lead author of the URDFormer study Zoey Chen, a UW doctoral student in the Allen School. “The tasks might be hard to do, but once you program a robot, it can keep doing the task over and over and over. Whereas homes are unique and constantly changing. There’s a diversity of objects, of tasks, of floorplans and of people moving through them. This is where AI becomes really useful to roboticists.”

The two systems approach these challenges in different ways.

RialTo — which Gupta created with a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — has someone pass through an environment and take video of its geometry and moving parts. For instance, in a kitchen, they’ll open cabinets and the toaster and the fridge. The system then uses existing AI models — and a human does some quick work through a graphic user interface to show how things move — to create a simulated version of the kitchen shown in the video. A virtual robot trains itself through trial and error in the simulated environment by repeatedly attempting tasks such as opening that toaster oven — a method called reinforcement learning.

By going through this process in the simulation, the robot improves at that task and works around disturbances or changes in the environment, such as a mug placed beside the toaster. The robot can then transfer that learning to the physical environment, where it’s nearly as accurate as a robot trained in the real kitchen.

The other system, URDFormer, is focused less on relatively high accuracy in a single kitchen; instead, it quickly and cheaply conjures hundreds of generic kitchen simulations. URDFormer scans images from the internet and pairs them with existing models of how, for instance, those kitchen drawers and cabinets will likely move. It then predicts a simulation from the initial real-world image, allowing researchers to quickly and inexpensively train robots in a huge range of environments. The trade-off is that these simulations are significantly less accurate than those that RialTo generates.

“The two approaches can complement each other,” Gupta said. “URDFormer is really useful for pre-training on hundreds of scenarios. RialTo is particularly useful if you've already pre-trained a robot, and now you want to deploy it in someone’s home and have it be maybe 95% successful.”

Moving forward, the RialTo team wants to deploy its system in peoples’ homes (it’s largely been tested in a lab), and Gupta said he wants to incorporate small amounts of real-world training data with the systems to improve their success rates.

“Hopefully, just a tiny amount of real-world data can fix the failures,” Gupta said. “But we still have to figure out how best to combine data collected directly in the real world, which is expensive, with data collected in simulations, which is cheap, but slightly wrong.”

On the URDFormer paper additional co-authors include the UW’s Aaron Walsman, Marius Memmel, Alex Fang — all doctoral students in the Allen School; Karthikeya Vemuri, an undergraduate in the Allen School; Alan Wu, a masters student in the Allen School; and Kaichun Mo, a research scientist at NVIDIA. Dieter Fox, a professor in the Allen School, was a co-senior author. On the URDFormer paper additional co-authors include MIT’s Marcel Torne, Anthony Simeonov, Tao Chen — all doctoral students; Zechu Li, a research assistant; and April Chan, an undergraduate. Pulkit Agrawal, an assistant professor at MIT, was a co-senior author. The URDFormer research was partially funded by Amazon Science Hub. The RialTo research was partially funded by the Sony Research Award, the U.S. Government and Hyundai Motor Company.

For more information, contact Gupta at abhgupta@cs.washington.edu and Chen at qiuyuc@uw.edu.

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Article Title

URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images

When is too much knowledge a bad thing?

A Knowledge Curse: How Knowledge Can Reduce Human Welfare

CORNELL UNIVERSITY MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE

FOR RELEASE: August 7, 2024

Kaitlyn Serrao

607-882-1140

kms465@cornell.edu

When is too much knowledge a bad thing?

ITHACA, N.Y. – A new study finds an increase in knowledge could be a bad thing when people use it to act in their own self-interest rather than in the best interests of the larger group.

Cornell University economics professor Kaushik Basu and Jörgen Weibull, professor emeritus at the Stockholm School of Economics, are co-authors of “A Knowledge Curse: How Knowledge Can Reduce Human Welfare,” published Aug. 7 in Royal Society Open Science.

According to the pair, even for a group of rational individuals, greater knowledge can backfire. And, they said, enhanced knowledge about an existing reality – such as the cost-benefit of wearing a face mask to help prevent the spread of disease – may hinder cooperation among purely self-interested individuals.

“We assume that a scientific breakthrough that gives us a deeper understanding of the world can only help,” said Basu. “Our paper shows that in the real world, where many people live and strive individually or in small groups to do well for themselves, this intuition may not hold. Science may not be the panacea we take it to be.”

Basu and Weibull build the case – with modeling in a theoretical two-player Base Game – that the “knowledge curse” can happen if, at first, only a few people are privy to the greater knowledge.

In the Base Game, each player has two actions to choose from. There are four combinations of actions, each with expected payoffs to both players. Each player chooses to maximize their own payoff.

However, if another set of options is added that introduces the chance that the other player would get nothing, along with an option of a very small payoff for both, the mutual small reward becomes more appealing – a form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which two “prisoners” can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner for individual reward. In other words, more “knowledge” can lead to worse overall outcomes.

The paper goes further and shows that a scientific breakthrough that does not add any new option but simply deepens the players’ understanding of the payoffs and their fluctuations can make the players worse off.

The authors extend their theoretical calculations into real-world dilemmas, such as crafting policy without knowing the full contours of a problem. The drafting of a nation’s constitution, for instance, must anticipate and address problems likely to occur well into a future with unknowable sets of circumstances. “Such preemptive laws have conferred large benefits to humankind,” the authors wrote.

“By drawing attention to this paradoxical result,” Basu said, “the paper urges policymakers and even the lay person to think of preemptive actions, agreements and moral commitments that we as human beings should take and make to avert disasters that future scientific advances can cause.

“Science can yield huge benefits, but we need safeguards,” he said. “What those are, we do not know. But the paper urges us to pay attention to this.”

Funding for this research came from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.

For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.

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Journal

Royal Society Open Science

Article Publication Date

7-Aug-2024

 

Work-from-home success might depend on home office setup

Dutch survey study links air ventilation and other home-office factors to productivity levels

PLOS

 

image: 

Dutch employees who worked from home tended to report higher levels of productivity and less burnout if they were more satisfied with their home office setup, according to the new study.

view more 

Credit: Domenico Loia, Unsplash, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

In a new survey study, Dutch employees who worked from home tended to report higher levels of productivity and less burnout if they were more satisfied with their home office setup. The study also linked more air ventilation in the home office to higher self-reported productivity. Martijn Stroom and colleagues at Maastricht University in the Netherlands report these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 7, 2024.

In recent years, thanks in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic and technological advancements, working from home has become the “new normal” for many workers who otherwise would have worked in offices. Researchers are increasingly exploring factors that may influence job satisfaction and productivity among employees who work from home, such as whether a particular job is well-suited for remote work.

However, few studies have looked at potential links between productivity, job satisfaction, and the physical home office environment. To address this knowledge gap, Stroom and colleagues surveyed 1,002 Dutch at-home workers about various characteristics of their home offices, as well as about their productivity, job satisfaction, and related measures. They applied statistical tools known as logistic regressions and structural equation models to identify links between the various factors.

The analysis showed that workers who had higher levels of satisfaction with their home office setup—including both environmental factors such as temperature and noise, as well as hardware items such as office chairs and screens—tended to have higher self-reported productivity and a lower propensity towards professional burnout.

The researchers also found that a higher level of air ventilation in the home office during the workday was statistically linked with higher productivity, greater willingness to continue working from home in the future, and lower propensity to burnout. This finding is in line with prior research linking air quality to workplace productivity. Moreover, they found a distinct discrepancy between the amount of ventilation and the most closely related self-reported satisfaction scores of indoor air, rates bringing to light the shortcomings of heavily relying on these self-reported scores which have been the basis for most literature and policy.

On the basis of their findings, the researchers suggest that investment in home-office hardware and environmental factors—supported by objective measurements of the indoor climate—could help ensure the future success of work-from-home policies. Meanwhile, additional research could help clarify any causal relationships between the factors explored in this study.

The authors add: “The physical climate of the home office plays a key role in work-from-home productivity. Different home offices are likely to lead to different willingness to work from home and work-from-home success!”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0306475

Citation: Stroom M, Eichholtz P, Kok N (2024) Does working from home work? That depends on the home. PLoS ONE 19(8): e0306475. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306475

Author Countries: The Netherlands

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

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Journal

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0306475 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Does working from home work? That depends on the home

Article Publication Date

7-Aug-2024

COI Statement

 

Trained dogs can sniff out CWD, a disease of major concern, in the droppings of farmed and wild deer, offering potential for non-invasive surveillance

PLOS

 

image: 

Glen J. Golden, Study Director, is running Moose during a single trial (out of 20) of the 1-in-5 scratch box assay used to monitor operantly conditioned responses of trained dogs to odors emitted from fecal samples derived from avian influenza virus-positive and avian influenza virus-negative donor mallards. The positive sample is in position 2 as Moose is indicating with a scratch alert. 

view more 

Credit: Raja Basak-Smith, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Trained dogs can sniff out CWD, a disease of major concern, in the droppings of farmed and wild deer, offering potential for non-invasive surveillance

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Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0303225

Article Title: Biodetection of an odor signature in white-tailed deer associated with infection by chronic wasting disease prions

Author Countries: USA

Funding: TWRA AP-14839 Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY, TENNESSEE https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/business-services/financial-management-division/financial_services_branch/agreements_service_center/terms-conditions-for-aphis-awards Dan Grove helped with study design, decision to publish and manuscript preparation TWRA APP-17383 Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY, TENNESSEE https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/business-services/financial-management-division/financial_services_branch/agreements_service_center/terms-conditions-for-aphis-awards Dan Grove helped with study design, decision to publish and manuscript preparation GJG APP-15390 National Wildlife Research Center https://www.aphis.usda.gov/national-wildlife-programs/nwrc No role played by funders GJG 22-7400-1646-CA National Wildlife Research Center https://www.aphis.usda.gov/national-wildlife-programs/nwrc No role played by funders.

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Journal

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0303225 

Article Title

Biodetection of an odor signature in white-tailed deer associated with infection by chronic wasting disease prions

Article Publication Date

7-Aug-2024

COI Statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

 

Electric bandage holds promise for treating chronic wounds

North Carolina State University

 

image: 

Photo of a water-powered, electronics-free dressing (WPED) for electrical stimulation of wounds.

view more 

Credit: Rajaram Kaveti

Researchers have developed an inexpensive bandage that uses an electric field to promote healing in chronic wounds. In animal testing, wounds that were treated with these electric bandages healed 30% faster than wounds treated with conventional bandages.

Chronic wounds are open wounds that heal slowly, if they heal at all. For example, sores that occur in some patients with diabetes are chronic wounds. These wounds are particularly problematic because they often recur after treatment and significantly increase the risk of amputation and death.

One of the challenges associated with chronic wounds is that existing treatment options are extremely expensive, which can create additional problems for patients.

“Our goal here was to develop a far less expensive technology that accelerates healing in patients with chronic wounds,” says Amay Bandodkar, co-corresponding author of the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “We also wanted to make sure that the technology is easy enough for people to use at home, rather than something that patients can only receive in clinical settings.”

“This project is part of a bigger DARPA project to accelerate wound healing with personalized wound dressings,” says Sam Sia, co-corresponding author of the work and professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University. “This collaborative project shows that these lightweight bandages, which can provide electrical stimulation simply by adding water, healed wounds faster than the control, at a similar rate as bulkier and more expensive wound treatment.” 

Specifically, the research team developed water-powered, electronics-free dressings (WPEDs), which are disposable wound dressings that have electrodes on one side and a small, biocompatible battery on the other. The dressing is applied to a patient so that the electrodes come into contact with the wound. A drop of water is then applied to the battery, activating it. Once activated, the bandage produces an electric field for several hours.

“That electric field is critical, because it’s well established that electric fields accelerate healing in chronic wounds,” says Rajaram Kaveti, co-first author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher at NC State.

 

The electrodes are designed in a way that allows them to bend with the bandage and conform to the surface of the chronic wounds, which are often deep and irregularly shaped.

“This ability to conform is critical, because we want the electric field to be directed from the periphery of the wound toward the wound’s center,” says Kaveti. “In order to focus the electric field effectively, you want electrodes to be in contact with the patient at both the periphery and center of the wound itself. And since these wounds can be asymmetrical and deep, you need to have electrodes that can conform to a wide variety of surface features.”

“We tested the wound dressings in diabetic mice, which are a commonly used model for human wound healing,” says Maggie Jakus, co-first author of the study and a graduate student at Columbia. “We found that the electrical stimulation from the device sped up the rate of wound closure, promoted new blood vessel formation, and reduced inflammation, all of which point to overall improved wound healing.” 

Specifically, the researchers found that mice who received treatment with WPEDs healed about 30% faster than mice who received conventional bandages.

“But it is equally important that these bandages can be produced at relatively low cost – we’re talking about a couple of dollars per dressing in overhead costs.” says Bandodkar.

“Diabetic foot ulceration is a serious problem that can lead to lower extremity amputations,” says Aristidis Veves, a co-author of the study and professor of surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Center. “There is urgent need for new therapeutic approaches, as the last one that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration was developed more than 25 years ago. My team is very lucky to participate in this project that investigates innovative and efficient new techniques that have the potential to revolutionize the management of diabetic foot ulcers.”

In addition, the WPEDs can be applied quickly and easily. And once applied, patients can move around and take part in daily activities. This functionality means that patients can receive treatment at home and are more likely to comply with treatment. In other words, patients are less likely to skip treatment sessions or take shortcuts, since they aren’t required to come to a clinic or remain immobile for hours.

“Next steps for us include additional work to fine-tune our ability to reduce fluctuations in the electric field and extend the duration of the field. We are also moving forward with additional testing that will get us closer to clinical trials and – ultimately – practical use that can help people,” says Bandodkar. 

The paper, “Water-powered, electronics-free dressings that electrically stimulate wounds for rapid wound closure,” will be published Aug. 7 in the open-access journal Science Advances. The paper’s co-authors include Henry Chen, an undergraduate in the joint biomedical engineering department at NC State and UNC; Bhavya Jain, Navya Mishra, Nivesh Sharma and Baha Erim Uzunoğlu, Ph.D. students at NC State; Darragh Kennedy and Elizabeth Caso of Columbia; Georgios Theocharidis and Brandon Sumpio of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Won Bae Han of Korea University and the Georgia Institute of Technology; Tae-Min Jang of Korea University; and Suk-Won Hwang of Korea University and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology.

This work was done with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under grant D20AC00004 and from the Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies at NC State, which is funded by National Science Foundation grant 1160483. Bandodkar and Kaveti are inventors on a patent application related to this work.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.ado7538 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Water-powered, electronics-free dressings that electrically stimulate wounds for rapid wound closure

Article Publication Date

7-Aug-2024

COI Statement

Bandodkar and Kaveti are inventors on a patent application related to this work.

 

Humans change their own behavior when training AI

McKelvey’s Chien-Ju Ho working with Art & Sciences’ Wouter Kool, PhD student Lauren Treiman to understand how human behavior changes in training AI

Washington University in St. Louis

By Chris Woolston

A new cross-disciplinary study by WashU researchers has uncovered an unexpected psychological phenomenon at the intersection of human behavior and artificial intelligence: When told they were training AI to play a bargaining game, participants actively adjusted their own behavior to appear more fair and just, an impulse with potentially important implications for real-world AI developers.

“The participants seemed to have a motivation to train AI for fairness, which is encouraging, but other people might have different agendas,” said Lauren Treiman, a PhD student in the Division of Computational and Data Sciences and lead author of the study. “Developers should know that people will intentionally change their behavior when they know it will be used to train AI.”

The study, published in PNAS, was supported by a seed grant from the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences (TRIADS), a signature initiative of the Arts & Sciences Strategic Plan. The co-authors are Wouter Kool, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Chien-Ju Ho, assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering. Kool and Ho are Treiman’s graduate advisors.

The study included five experiments, each with roughly 200-300 participants. Subjects were asked to play the “Ultimatum Game,” a challenge that requires them to negotiate small cash payouts (just $1 to $6) with other human players or a computer. In some cases, they were told their decisions would be used to teach an AI bot how to play the game.

The players who thought they were training AI were consistently more likely to seek a fair share of the payout, even if such fairness cost them a few bucks. Interestingly, that behavior change persisted even after they were told their decisions were no longer being used to train AI, suggesting the experience of shaping technology had a lasting impact on decision-making.  “As cognitive scientists, we’re interested in habit formation,” Kool said. “This is a cool example because the behavior continued even when it was not called for anymore.”

Still, the impulse behind the behavior isn’t entirely clear. Researchers didn’t ask about specific motivations and strategies, and Kool explained that participants may not have felt a strong obligation to make AI more ethical. It’s possible, he said, that the experiment simply brought out their natural tendencies to reject offers that seemed unfair. “They may not really be thinking about the future consequences,” he said. “They could just be taking the easy way out.” 

“The study underscores the important human element in the training of AI,” said Ho, a computer scientist who studies the relationships between human behaviors and machine learning algorithms. “A lot of AI training is based on human decisions,” he said. “If human biases during AI training aren’t taken into account, the resulting AI will also be biased. In the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of issues arising from this sort of mismatch between AI training and deployment.”

Some facial recognition software, for example, is less accurate at identifying people of color, Ho said. “That’s partly because the data used to train AI is biased and unrepresentative,” he said.

Treiman is now conducting follow-up experiments to get a better sense of the motivations and strategies of people training AI. “It’s very important to consider the psychological aspects of computer science,” she said. 

Treiman LS, Ho CJ, Kool W. The consequences of AI training on human decision-making. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Aug. 6, 2024.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2408731121

 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2408731121 

 

Asthma emergencies spike when allergenic pollen blooms

New study highlights need for science-based pollen forecasts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. – A new Cornell University study that tracks how many asthma-related emergency room visits result from pollen in metropolitan areas highlights the importance of knowing local plants and the need for developing science-based pollen forecasts.

Such forecasts could alert vulnerable individuals on days when they should consider staying indoors or taking allergy medications ahead of time.

“Even though the percent of asthma-related emergency department visits associated with pollen overall was only a few percent on an annual basis, at certain times of year when particular types of pollen were spiking, we sometimes saw up to almost 20% of visits were due to pollen,” said Daniel Katz, assistant professor and first author of the study.

To figure out which asthma emergencies may have been activated by pollen, as opposed to a virus or other cause, the researchers collected data from the Texas Department of State Health Services and analyzed close to 175,000 asthma-related emergency room visits between 2015 and 2020. They singled out visits from patients who lived within about 15 miles of one of eight pollen monitoring stations where airborne pollen concentrations are measured.

When pollen and virus prevalence were high at the same time, the researchers had the advantage of an abundance of data, from eight cities and over five years, to uncover the likely causes.

“Sometimes the timing of when viruses were prevalent changed,” Katz said, “and sometimes the timing of when pollen was in the air changed. So, because of this natural variability, we were able to better untangle what was contributing to these asthma-related emergency department visits.”

The researchers chose cities for the study based on their proximity to Central Texas, where a species of tree, Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei), one of the most important allergenic pollen-producing trees, is prevalent. Some cities were in the middle of these pollen hot spots and others were far from them.

“We ended up finding that some of the cities had these spikes in asthma-related emergency department visits in January, when that species releases its pollen, whereas cities outside its primary range did not have corresponding spikes,” Katz said. Still, he said, various pollen is in the air for most of the year in Texas, creating challenges for people with asthma.

The study helps inform Katz’s ongoing work to develop publicly available pollen forecasts that incorporate remote sensing and atmospheric dispersion and plant ecology.

For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.

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Journal

Environmental Research

DOI

10.1016/j.envres.2024.119346 

 

New Center of Excellence at Chapman University will study quantum theory and the nature of reality

Chapman University

An interdisciplinary team of scholars have received a $2.43 million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation to create a “Southern California Quantum Foundations Hub” at Chapman University. This unique collaboration includes theoretical physicists, experimental physicists and philosophers, who will apply the methods of their respective disciplines to provide deeper insights into the nature of reality that quantum theory is silent about. The Templeton Foundation has identified the area of quantum foundations as one of their key funding priorities.

Researchers Andrew Jordan (physics), Matt Leifer (physics), Emily Adlam (philosophy and physics), and Kelvin McQueen (philosophy) at Chapman will seek answers to some of the most pressing and confounding questions in their fields. Three research themes will be explored: (1) The Nature of the Quantum State, (2) Past and Future Boundary Conditions, and (3) Agency in Quantum Observers. Each theme has contributions planned for theory, experiment, and philosophy. The grant will also support experiments by Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto, physics) and Eddy Chen (UCSD, philosophy).

Andrew Jordan, professor, Schmid College of Science and Technology said, “Chapman university has invested strongly to make one of the best quantum foundations groups in the world. I’m very excited by the John Templeton foundation’s decision to choose our faculty to lead their research hub on this topic in the United States. Our activities will provide a center to attract experts from around the world to come and work with us.”

“We plan to work on topics that will expand our understanding of the quantum state and in what sense it is reflective of external reality and/or our degree of knowledge. The nature of time is also fundamental to integrating past and future events into a new theory we are developing of continuously monitored quantum systems.  We will also explore our freedom as agents acting on quantum systems and explore the idea of if an agent itself can be a quantum system.”

Topics in quantum foundations, as well as breaking discoveries and insights will also be taught to the wider scientific community and public through regular seminars posted on their YouTube channel, annual conferences, and public lectures. 

“The John Templeton Foundation grant establishing the Southern California Quantum Foundations Hub at Chapman University is a testament to the game-changing impact of our faculty’s interdisciplinary research–past and future,” said Chapman President Daniele Struppa, Ph.D. “With this grant, our university will become the primary center of excellence in the United States for the field of quantum foundations, an emerging field ripe with potential for major scientific discoveries and a greater understanding of the nature of reality.”

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About Chapman University

Founded in 1861, Chapman University is a nationally ranked private university in Orange, California, about 30 miles south of Los Angeles. Chapman serves nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students, with a 12:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Students can choose from 123 areas of study within 11 colleges for a personalized education. Chapman is categorized by the Carnegie Classification as an R2 "high research activity" institution. Students at Chapman learn directly from distinguished world-class faculty including Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur fellows, published authors and Academy Award winners. The campus has produced a Rhodes Scholar, been named a top producer of Fulbright Scholars and hosts a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest and most prestigious honor society. Chapman also includes the Harry and Diane Rinker Health Science Campus in Irvine. The university features the No. 4 film school and No. 60 business school in the U.S. Learn more about Chapman University: www.chapman.edu.