Schmidt Sciences has named SRI Chair Roger Grosse and Faculty Affiliate Marzyeh Ghassemi to its 2024 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. The program funds senior researchers and early career scholars to address a wide range of global challenges in AI.

What opportunities and challenges are there for the use of AI in healthcare? At a recent SRI workshop, experts explored how AI is transforming Ontario's healthcare sector, highlighting its potential to improve care and exploring pressing challenges around patient involvement, health equity, and trustworthy implementation.

SRI researcher Silviu Pitis draws on decision theory to study how the principles of reward design for reinforcement learning agents are formulated. He also aims to understand how large language models make decisions by examining their implicit assumptions. Pitis has received a prestigious OpenAI Superalignment Fast Grant to support his research.

What does safe artificial intelligence look like? Could AI go rogue and pose an existential threat to humanity? These were among the pressing questions tackled by SRI experts during a recent panel discussion on AI safety.

The SRI Seminar Series returns for fall 2024 with leading experts across various fields, including computer science, communications, law, healthcare, and philosophy. Seminars will explore new questions at the intersection of technology and society through critical issues such as trust, inequality, public policy, and the ethical implications of AI systems.

In April 2024, the Government of Canada pledged $2.4bn toward AI in its annual budget, including $50m for a new AI Safety Institute. What scope, expertise, and authority will the new institute need to achieve its full potential? We examine the early approaches of similar institutes in the UK, US, and EU.

SRI Director David Lie and 18 collaborators—including five other SRI researchers— will receive $5.6 million in grants over the next four years to develop solutions for critical artificial intelligence (AI) challenges. Learn more about the new funding from NSERC and CSE.

The field of AI safety emphasizes that systems be aligned with human values, often stating AI should “do no harm.” But lethal autonomous systems used for firearms and drones are already harming people. How can we address the reality of purposely harmful AI systems? SRI Graduate Fellow Michael Zhang writes about a panel of experts exploring this topic.

Get to know the 15 new faculty affiliates joining the SRI research community for the 2024–25 academic year. The new cohort of affiliates has expertise in a variety of fields across social sciences, humanities, and STEM disciplines, including geography, psychology, information studies, management, criminology, sociology, history, cultural studies, public health, physiology, pharmaceutical sciences, computer science, and engineering.

World-leading computer security expert David Lie will take on the role of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s (SRI) director, while two renowned AI safety experts—Roger Grosse and David Duvenaud—are being appointed Schwartz Reisman Chairs in Technology and Society.