artificial intelligence

Thomas Dietterich will receive the highest honor for a career in artificial intelligence for his four decades of intellectual leadership in machine learning. Only 23 others have received the Award for Research Excellence from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence since its inception in 1985. The first to receive the award was John McCarthy, known as the father of AI. Dietterich will accept the award in August at the annual conference 2024 IJCAI in Jeju, South Korea.

Ph.D. student Quintin Pope considers technology’s potential to alter social dynamics

Photo by Owen Roth

Quintin Pope doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about artificial intelligence hastening the demise of civilization. In fact, he estimates the probability of “pure AI doom” to be less than 1%.

Real-world experience just hasn’t borne out any worst-case scenarios, he says.

“A lot of the arguments people made about AI, prior to there being any AI worthy of the name to argue about, turned out to be totally wrong,” Pope said.

Eric Slyman presenting at the Graduate Research Showcase.

Eric Slyman builds tools to uncover where artificial intelligence makes mistakes.

Specifically, the Ph.D. student in artificial intelligence and computer science looks at how AI learns social biases. And they’ve built a tool to help AI auditors address it — quickly, accurately and economically.

Bias in AI can show up, for example, when a user asks it to find or create an image of a doctor.

Coral ecosystem under study in the lab of Rebecca Vega Thurber.
 

Zahir Alsulaimawi, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, received a best paper and presentation award at the Sixth International Conference on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

Alsulaimawi, who earned master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State, researches ways to make machine learning models smarter without compromising people’s privacy.

An illustration of a scenario depicting many tasks of interest to researchers in Embodied AI. Here, we have multiple robots operating in a kitchen environment, with a human asking one of the robots if there is any cereal left, while the other one cleans the dishes. The robots must use their navigation, manipulation, and reasoning skills to answer and achieve tasks in the environment. Illustration courtesy of Winson Han.
 

Photo by Johanna Carson

Medema Labs, a startup company spun out from engineering research at Oregon State University, is developing software tools powered by machine learning to help small- and medium-size manufacturers make better business decisions.