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.

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.

The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society is proud to welcome four new faculty fellows and 15 graduate fellows from across the University of Toronto. SRI fellowships support interdisciplinary research projects that build new approaches to examine the complex relations between technology and society.

How can we help people recognize AI-generated images? Can we prevent copyrighted materials from being used in training data? What’s going on in the new field of forensic analysis of ML systems? These and related topics were at the centre of the 2024 Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) conference in Toronto. Read the highlights.

As challenges such as AI safety, data privacy, and misinformation become increasingly prevalent, the Embedded Ethics Education Initiative integrates ethics modules into computer science courses at U of T. In recognition of the program’s impact on the student learning experience, the team has won the 2024 Northrop Frye Award

Acclaimed science fiction author Ted Chiang reflects on these and related questions: What is the relationship between technology and human cognition? How have writing and language been deployed as technologies throughout human history? And what does the future of computers hold—will it give rise to a new kind of cognitive technology?

The Schwartz Reisman Institute’s annual academic conference will take place May 6–8, 2024, with select sessions taking place in the newly-completed Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus located in the heart of Toronto’s Discovery District. Speakers include: Peter Railton, Harper Reed, Huili Chen, Ray Perrault, Gillian Hadfield, and more.

Can algorithmic decision-making help clear backlogs in the courts, and is this a justified use of the technology? Do automated systems make “better” decisions than human judges, and what do we mean by “better”? Should legal professionals be involved in the design of automated systems, and if so, how? Nathalie Smuha and Abdi Aidid discuss these and related questions.

Undergraduate students at the University of Toronto reflect on what they learned from attending a book launch event on data and human rights—and how they see the future unfolding in the digital age.

U of T University Professor emeritus and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton delivered a lecture at Convocation Hall discussing whether large language models understand what they are doing and the existential risks posed by unfettered development of the technology he helped create.

A new white paper published by the Schwartz Reisman Institute explores how synergies between AI regulation and existing consumer protection principles can be leveraged to ensure policy-makers do not need to start from scratch when it comes to developing governance for the use of AI in financial services.

Amidst today’s broad social impacts of data, we must pay specific attention to the risks posed by facial recognition technology, writes Daniel Konikoff, who argues that Bill C-27’s failure to classify biometric data as sensitive suggests that the bill has an unstable grasp on our tricky technological present.