In this interview series, we’re meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. In this latest interview, we hear from Sukanya Mandal about her PhD so far. Tell us a bit about your PhD – where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am Sukanya Mandal, a PhD student at Dublin City University in ..read more

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is taking place this week in Vienna, Austria. During the opening of the conference, the outstanding paper award winners, and honourable mentions, were announced. The conference organisers also introduced a new award for this year: the test of time award. This award honours a paper from 2013/2014 that the programme chairs judge to have had a lasting impact. Test of time award Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes Diederik Kingma, Max Welling Abstract: How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic ..read more

The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation. This month, our trustees tackle the topic of trustworthy AI. Joining the conversation this time are: Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), and Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University). Sabine Hauert: There was a big trustworthy autonomous systems conference a few weeks back in London, and on the back of that they’ve launched a big responsible AI portfolio. I know Europe has been focusing on trustworthiness and how responsible these algorithms are. Deploying these systems i ..read more

Motunrayo Kilanko is a seasoned data management and analytics specialist who has worked in the fields of data analysis, data management, and data annotation for machine learning. She works presently as a management analyst with a government healthcare agency in the State of Delaware, United States. She is also an AI enthusiast that teaches women how to use AI for their work and business. Her career interests spans Data, AI, public health, and empowerment of women. She is the founder of Femote, a social impact startup that provides business support and outsourcing services such as data annotat ..read more

In a series of interviews, we’re meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. In this latest interview, we met Salena Torres Ashton and found out about her work focusing on causality and natural language. Could you start by telling us a bit about your PhD – whereabouts are you studying and what is the topic of ..read more

By George Veletsianos, University of Minnesota Every few years, an emerging technology shows up at the doorstep of schools and universities promising to transform education. The most recent? Technologies and apps that include or are powered by generative artificial intelligence, also known as GenAI. These technologies are sold on the potential they hold for education. For example, Khan Academy’s founder opened his 2023 Ted Talk by arguing that “we’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” As optimistic as these visions of the f ..read more

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we hear about the effect of computing resource on AI research, learn about creating explanations for AI-based decision-making systems, and find out about the moderating effect of instant runoff voting. Meeting researchers working on explainable AI In a series of interviews, we’re chatting to some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. In our latest two interviews, we met Bálint Gy ..read more

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology’s impact on society. Good tech with Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney This episode we’re chatting with Eleanor and Kerry on good technology and if it’s even possible, that technology is political, watering down regulation, the magic of AI, the value of human creativity, how Feminism, Aboriginal, and mixed race studies can help AI development, the performa ..read more

The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation. This month, we consider the debate around open vs closed science. Joining the conversation this time are: Joydeep Biswas (The University of Texas at Austin), Sanmay Das (George Mason University), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol) and Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University). Sabine Hauert: There have been many discussions online recently about the topic of open vs closed science. We’ve seen a lot of people advocating for open AI (not the company, but being open generall ..read more

Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, and Sanmi Koyejo won a NeurIPS 2023 outstanding paper award for their work Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?. In their paper, they present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities in large language models. We spoke to Brando about this work, their alternative theory, and what inspired it. Firstly, could you define what emergence is and what it means in the context of large language models? This is a good and hard question to answer cleanly because the word emergence has been around in science for a while. For example, in physic ..read more