AI technology is booming in Arizona

A new report from the Arizona Commerce Authority highlighted the state's increasingly critical role in machine learning technology development — and the University of Arizona is a key player. 

A major example is the work of SIE professor Roberto Furfaro, who was awarded $4.5M to lead the development of improved navigation and control systems for autonomous vehicles operating at hypersonic speeds.

"Many conventional systems are designed using linear theory, and are not designed to fly or intercept at that speed," Furfaro said. "There are a lot of things happening in hypersonic flow that are so nonlinear that they are not fully understood, and that we need to characterize if we want to design systems that work under these conditions."

The three-year proposed research, awarded in 2022, is sponsored by the Joint Hypersonic Transition Office through the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH).

"With meta learning, we can train it not only on one scenario, but on many scenarios," Furfaro said. "The system is able to learn over a distribution environment, and every time it converges faster to the next one. By enabling this continuous learning, we are basically able to have a system that continually adapts."