Exploring AI Matters

Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of death in adults worldwide.  The most important diagnostic and therapeutic technique for colorectal cancer is the colonoscopy.  Gastrointestinal doctors are working with computer scientists to develop AI-based technologies to help enhance outcomes. We are fortunate to have Professor Doctor Julia Mayerle of the University of Munich as our guest.  Dr...

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we have two guests from the most senior ranks of the Royal Air force, Air Marshals Philip Osborn and Edward Stringer.  Both men joined the UK’s Royal Air Force in 1982.  Air Marshal Stringer served 36 years until 2018; and Air Marshal Obsorn served 37 years until 2019. Intelligence has always been about dredging through vast pools of dull bureaucratic docume...

From ancient times what we now call mathematical models have been used to predict the arrival of seasons, comet returns, and eclipses.  With sophisticated mathematics, good data gathering, and modern computers we can now predict things like the tides and the trajectories of interplanetary probes with considerable accuracy.  We have also made progress in predicting weather. For some phenomena, for...

This episode of the ABA-funded podcast Exploring AI Matters was recorded at a Continuing Legal Education session.  Our subject is, "The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence." Our two guests, Candace Jones and Jon Garon, are distinguished lawyers who have written extensively on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.  Some of their writing are included in the mater...

AI is increasingly viewed as a potential co-creator of text, images, videos, music, and audio.  However, in March of 2023 the US Copyright Office expressed the view that ‘copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity.’ In this episode of Exploring AI Matters Claudia Ray, a partner in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis, a major law firm with a distinguished IP...

The entertainment industry in the US, with revenues in 2022 of about 8.5 billion dollars, is only three hundredths of one percent of the 23.3 trillion dollar US economy.  However, entertainment is far more important to society as a whole than the industry’s financials might suggest. In 2022 when large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini began to show signs of prodigious capab...

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters, #22, and the following one, #23 we are going to do something unusual.  We will explore the adoption of sophisticated control automation and look for lessons that may apply to the adoption of AI-augmented systems. To help us understand these lessons, we are fortunate to have for our next two episodes Professor David Mindell of MIT.  He is the acclaimed autho...

Welcome to the second of two episodes with MIT Professor David Mindell.  In these conversations we are exploring the detailed realities of "human in the loop" systems.  In the first session we learned about the Apollo Program's lunar landing control system.  In this episode we are going to explore an important contemporary human plus computer control system failures involving a ship...

The public has been fascinated by the experience of interacting with large language models, or LLMs, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.  Inaccuracies, called hallucinations, continue to appear in LLM output.  Some lawyers, among others, continue to use these outputs without verifying their accuracy.  Doing so damages their work product and reputations. In this episode of Explorin...

Once upon a time we thought we had privacy. Then came credit cards, which captured the card owner's location and activity with each transaction. Then came the Internet, which made connecting all the dots easy and cheap, and the erosion of privacy accelerated. Large language models, LLMs, like the Generative AI system ChatGPT and its ilk have the potential to make the cost of connecting dots v...

In 2023 New York Times journalist Kevin Roose reported that a chatbot had declared love for him and urged him to divorce his wife.  Since then stories abound of vulnerable people harming themselves after lengthy exchanges with GenAI chatbots.  In a recent instance, a vulnerable teen discussed suicide with a chatbot and asked for feedback about the noose he had fashioned.  In yet another instance a...

Good credit impacts whether you can rent an apartment, take out a mortgage or car loan, or in some instances, receive a job offer. Financial institutions are increasingly utilizing AI to analyze non-traditional data sources, such as standardized test scores, to assess a borrower’s risk profile. In this episode of Exploring AI Matters Dr. Talia Gillis, Professor of Law at Columbia University, will...

In the early-eighteenth century, Rembrandt’s largest and most famous painting, The Night Watch , was cut down on all sides to fit on a wall in Amsterdam’s City Hall.  The removed pieces were never recovered. In this episode of Exploring AI Matters, Rob Erdmann, Senior Scientist at Rijksmuseum and Professor at the Rijksmuseum and Professor at the University of Amsterdam, walks us through how museum...

A supermassive black hole is estimated to be a million or a billion times bigger than the Sun, but no one truly yet understands the origins of these massive phenomena. In this episode of Exploring AI Matters, Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist and research fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford University, describes how AI is helping to answer fundamental questions about the formation and evo...

From self-driving cars to voice automation in homes, inventors are developing ambitious AI technologies that will continue to impact the ways in which we learn, work, communicate, and travel. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the number of AI-related patents increased at an astonishing number, from 4,598 in 2008 to 20,639 in 2018. In this episode of Exploring AI M...

In this episode of Mind the Gap we talk with the President of Harvey Mudd College, Dr. Maria Klawe, who has had a distinguished career as a theoretical computer scientist, scholar, and college administrator.  Dr. Klawe is also a gifted painter -- a watercolorist.  And she has been painting for longer than she has been a computer scientist.  In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we explore with D...

Strokes are one of the most frightening of maladies, striking as they do at the brain, the center of personhood.  In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we talk with the founder and leader of one of the leading stroke centers, Dr Stanley Tuhrim of the Mount Sinai Comprehensive Stroke Center in New York City.  Mount Sinai’s Stroke Centers have been leading adopters of powerful AI techniques, the f...

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located high in the Andes in Chile, is expected to be operational near the end of 2023.  The Rubin’s wide-field reflecting telescope will scan the entire southern sky every few nights.  In this episode of Exploring AI Matters our guest, Harvard Professor of Astronomy Edo Berger, a leader in the Rubin Observatory’s work will be our guide to what is intriguing in deep...

Today we are speaking with Dr Rohan Shad of Stanford University Medical Center, now an Integrated Cardiothoracic Surgery Resident at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has been exploring the application of AI techniques to help surgeons anticipate and reduce risks in certain heart surgeries. [2023-05-30]

Judge Katherine Forrest, a former federal court judge and our guest in this episode, observes that machine learning systems build models from historical behavior that can reflect structural bias or discrimination.  She notes that the inclusion of flawed data in AI models has serious implications for personal liberty, with particular consequences for Black defendants. On this episode of Exploring A...

We all agree that new technologies are cool, but unintended consequences can be very hard to reverse.  Today we will be talking with Dr Christina Colclough, a political economist with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen.  She has been engaged for over a decade in the global discussion of digital technology as it relates to work and workers across the world. [2023-07-10]

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we discuss swarm behavior in social organisms like bees, termites and ants.  These emergent behaviors point the way toward possible military applications for swarms of drones or other robots. Our guest for this episode is Lieutenant Colonel Jason Cody from the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Colonel Cody’s doctoral research at Vanderbilt focus...

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we talk with an accomplished leader in national security.  Air Marshal John Blackburn retired from the Royal Australian Air Force in 2008 as the Deputy Chief of the Air Force following a career as a fighter pilot, test pilot, and strategic planner. Defense procurement processes struggle with rapidly evolving technologies.  These next-generation systems are s...

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we discuss US Air Force funded weather research at MIT with Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) Andrew Bowne, the chief legal counsel of the Air Force-MIT AI Accelerator.  Major Bowne is a Judge Advocate in the US Air Force.  In addition to his extensive legal credentials, Major Bowne is a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Adelaide in...

AI is no longer a figment of the imagination.   We are all using AI every day, whether we know it or not. Despite its prominence in daily life, AI still remains a mystery to many.  In this episode of Exploring AI Matters, Dr. Stuart Feldman, a prominent computer scientist, will help us better understand what AI is and is not, how it can be used, and its broad impact.  [2022-05-12] (Note that this...