November 2024 CASMI received a Chicago Innovation Award on Nov. 14 during a ceremony at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Forum. CASMI was one of 22 organizations to be selected as a winner from a pool of 350 nominations.
November 2024 Kristian Hammond, director of CASMI and member of the Provost’s Generative AI Advisory Committee, talks about the university's approach to AI.
from The Daily Northwestern
November 2024 Notes on the News: An assertion that AI models are hurtling towards a commoditized "race to the bottom" might initially seem grim, yet CASMI Director Kristian Hammond believes it's a beneficial turning point.
October 2024 Notes on the News: The launch of OpenAI's Swarm and o-1 projects harkens back to an earlier era, CASMI Director Kristian Hammond argues.
October 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to the Nobel Committee's decision to award four AI pioneers with its prizes in physics and chemistry.
October 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses the use of AI in education.
October 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses OpenAI's new reasoning model, which is nicknamed "Strawberry."
October 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses embracing failure in AI systems.
October 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on how hallucinations are an inherent part of how language models function.
October 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains what businesses are doing wrong regarding AI technologies and why proper integration is key to success.
September 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains why parents are trusting Waymo's self-driving cars to take their kids to school.
September 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses the use of AI in Policing.
September 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explain the risks of training systems on their own data.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains the issue of tasking AI with summarizing text.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses the role of hallucinations in large language models.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond responds to legislation that Congress is working to pass, focused on online safety for children.
August 2024 Notes on the News: A recent report says that the hype surrounding generative AI is waning. This means it's now time to put in real work, according to CASMI Director Kristian Hammond.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses former President Donald Trump's use of deepfakes.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to reports that OpenAI is working on a new reasoning technology called Strawberry.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses an open letter that five Secretaries of State penned to Elon Musk, urging the owner of X to immediately implement changes to his social media platform's AI search assistant, Grok, to "ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.”
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to OpenAI's announcement that it is testing a new search engine.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond responds to a Google Gemini commercial which was advertised during the Olympics before being pulled due to backlash.
August 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains why large language models are bad at math.
July 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond argues that our current approach of using benchmarks to judge AI tools seems to be flawed.
July 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reflects on a conversation had at a dinner on the use of AI in education.
July 2024 “The A.I. chatbots have difficulty with math because they were never designed to do it,” CASMI Director Kristian Hammond told The New York Times.
from The New York Times
July 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on the 18th Edition of the International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice, or SubTech, an annual event which examines the impact of technology in law.
July 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to Microsoft and Apple's decision not to join OpenAI's observer board.
July 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to OpenAI's five-step plan toward artificial general intelligence.
July 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond responds to Google's latest environmental report, which shows a 48% increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the last five years.
June 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on Apple's strategy to incorporate AI into its products.
June 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to an open letter from former employees of OpenAI, who are warning about the risks posed by the technologies and the need to protect whistleblowers.
June 2024 The term slop became more prevalent last month when Google incorporated its Gemini A.I. model into its U.S.-based search results. That created a problem, CASMI Director Kristian Hammond told The New York Times.
from The New York Times
June 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond shares a touching story about Blockbuster to highlight the potential of AI's role in the future of work.
June 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on the dangers of marketing friendly and cute AI systems.
June 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on Google's shift from search engine to answer machine with its decision to integrate AI.
May 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on the latest program from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): ARIA — Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI.
May 2024 NOTES ON THE NEWS: As we move deeper into the age of automatically generated content, we find ourselves edging closer to a modern-day Library of Babel.
May 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses OpenAI's decision to use a voice similar to Scarlett Johansson's for their latest model, GPT-4o.
May 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to a bipartisan bill that would offer massive funding for artificial intelligence.
May 2024 Google’s idea is a great one, but needs further validation, according to CASMI Director Kristian Hammond.
from Northwestern Now
May 2024 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond participated in a panel at the Behavioral Science & Policy Association's annual conference to discuss the role behavioral science can play in regulating AI.
from Behavioral Scientist
May 2024 Haoqi Zhang wants other computer scientists, including researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI), to examine their thinking from a consequentialist point of view (which judges actions solely by their consequences, i.e. goal-reaching methods) to also incorporate a dialectical mindset (which emphasizes the inherent value of an activity, e.g. being a good friend).
May 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses recent hallucinations from Meta's AI chatbot, which confused some Facebook users.
May 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond proposes a suite of approaches that can be applied to uncover possible harm.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond comments on the AI arms race.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains how educators and students should use language models.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to recent reports of AI use during warfare.
April 2024 CASMI researchers developed a tool that supports community-driven data curation for AI evaluation.
April 2024 MSAI director Kristian Hammond discusses OpenAI's new Sora model and its ability to create realistic video.
from Master of Science in Artificial Intellience (MSAI)
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses the pressing issue of public school students creating pornographic deepfakes of their classmates.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to a proposal in Pennsylvania that would require you to tag content that is generated by a machine.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond responds to an attempt from Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg at calming people's fears regarding the use of generative AI to influence people’s political views.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to a proposal which would require companies to disclose their use of copyrighted work for training generative AI models.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to a report which claims tech companies that are building large language models or other foundation models have perhaps been playing a little fast and loose with copyright law and user agreements.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses a report that China is using AI to create propaganda in the US, South Korea, and India.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond reacts to an announcement that the EU and US will work together to evaluate artificial intelligence models.
April 2024 Notes on the News: CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses an open letter from musical artists which urges tech platforms to stop devaluing music.
March 2024 Access to mental health services is limited, so people are turning to the internet to find the information they need. New research finds this information-gathering process is cyclical and involves both search engines and social media platforms. The discovery is aimed at empowering online users to help make design changes.
March 2024 CASMI is engaging with lawmakers and business leaders as it educates the public about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
March 2024 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains how the city of Chicago should embrace its Second City nickname to put AI to work.
from Crain's Chicago Business
March 2024 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond is a member of Northwestern's newly created Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DS/AI) Steering Committee.
from Northwestern Leadership Notes
February 2024 CASMI is supporting AI safety research through the AI Incidents and Best Practices track at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-24).
February 2024 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond tells CNN, "The clarity of truth we thought we had with recorded photography and video is gone."
from CNN
February 2024 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond says AI products carry the potential to improve and ease video storytelling, but they could also supercharge internet misinformation and enhance government propaganda, blurring the already-faint line between real and fake content online.
from ABC News
February 2024 “It’s time to admit we’re soon going to be surrounded by representations of the world which aren’t real … and they will become less and less real every day,” said CASMI Director Kristian Hammond.
from Washington Post
February 2024 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond joined “Chicago Tonight” on Feb. 5, 2024, to discuss the implications of AI on the election.
from WTTW
January 2024 The creators of the Political Deepfakes Incidents Database ‒ Christina Walker, Purdue University PhD candidate in political science; Daniel Schiff, Purdue assistant professor of technology policy; and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Purdue assistant professor of political science ‒ won the inaugural Northwestern Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) AI Incidents and Best Practices Paper Award.
January 2024 If AI is not already in your doctor’s office, you can bet it’s coming soon — with the potential to create major improvements in our health care and well-being.
from Northwestern Magazine
December 2023 In law and legal services, large language models (LLMs) — such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard — could be a game-changer. Yet these technologies pose more questions than answers.
from Northwestern Engineering
December 2023 The popular lecture series drew record numbers with this year’s topic. CASMI Director Kristian Hammond was the series’ first featured speaker.
from Northwestern Now
November 2023 CASMI researchers from Carnegie Mellon University traveled on Nov. 6-9 to Delft, Netherlands to present findings from their research project, which is exploring key differences between human and AI judgment to support more effective human-AI decision-making.
November 2023 In a cooperative initiative, UL Research Institutes (ULRI) and Northwestern University are working to bring safety to the forefront of the rapidly expanding field of AI and machine learning through their leadership of the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) research hub.
from Corporate Engagement
November 2023 On November 10, the Gender Equity Initiative at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the Northwestern University Law and Technology Initiative cohosted the “Gender and Intersectional Bias in Artificial Intelligence Conference” to discuss how and why AI reflects and exacerbates historical and social inequities and innovative technical and legal approaches to mitigate those biases.
from Computer Science Department
November 2023 For the second year in a row, CASMI attended the annual Chicago Innovation Awards as a Top 100 Finalist.
November 2023 CASMI researchers are working to understand plausible AI risks through a unique, writing-based method.
November 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond says President Biden's executive order on artificial intelligence is about “how we can improve things, how we can do a better job, and making sure that all the federal agencies take rein over what they see as the problematic areas.”
from The Steve Cochran Show WLS-AM 890
October 2023 CASMI supported a special interest group (SIG) event on Oct. 17 in Minneapolis called “Purposeful AI.”
October 2023 CASMI designed and led a workshop to support the expansion of the National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) guidance from a sociotechnical lens.
October 2023 CASMI research is aimed at helping designers form rich and accurate descriptions of real-life situations so that they can create context-aware responsible tools.
October 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond says guardrails will help determine how much help or harm AI can bring to the world.
from NBC Chicago
October 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond says AI is currently causing issues we need to address now, as opposed to focusing on existential threats.
from CBS News
October 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains how the use of chatbots to attend to customers can be positive or negative.
from WBEZ Chicago
September 2023 CASMI is co-hosting a workshop on Oct. 16-17 in Washington, D.C. to test and evaluate sociotechnical approaches for AI systems, focusing specifically on expanding the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF).
September 2023 CASMI researchers are working to understand what is causing bias in a popular predictor tool that is quick to train.
September 2023 CASMI researchers are studying expectant mothers’ stress levels to combat them in real time and even prevent them.
September 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains how artificial intelligence is changing how students learn and what this could mean for professors.
from NBC Chicago
August 2023 Law enforcement agencies are using machine learning technologies to forecast where crime might occur. CASMI has supported newly published research that is aimed at mitigating the risks in data-driven policing.
August 2023 CASMI researchers have investigated threats to validity and reliability in human-AI decision-making and have demonstrated how new methods may help address these challenges.
August 2023 On July 18 and 19, CASMI hosted 32 interdisciplinary scholars from academia, industry, and government for its workshop, “Sociotechnical Approaches to Measurement and Validation for Safety in AI," to discuss how to meaningfully operationalize safe, functional AI systems.
July 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses the European Union's proposed legislation aimed at reducing risks posed by artificial intelligence.
from Scripps News
July 2023 Tetiana Zakharchenko, senior lecturer at Ukrainian Catholic University, and Nazarii Drushchak, graduate student in data science, have balanced blackouts and empty classrooms while researching fairness and accuracy in artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
July 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond says, over the next decade, it will be challenging to tell the difference between what content is real and what has been manipulated.
from Voice of America (VOA)
July 2023 CASMI researchers have found a simple and effective way to identify unknown and anomalous data for language models, which improves safety and reliability.
July 2023 Experts like CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explain how chatbots work and what large language models don't know.
from Business Insider
June 2023 Several CASMI researchers attended the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT), an event that is closely aligned with the focus of CASMI's next workshop, “Sociotechnical Approaches to Measurement and Validation for Safety in AI.”
June 2023 Using eye-tracking technology, CASMI researchers gathered data about eye gaze signals, with help from 11 people with disabilities, and concluded that it’s likely assistive devices can be designed to allow for smoother control.
June 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond called the idea that A.I. could one day wipe out humanity "shockingly overly dramatic" and a "distraction" from the real issue.
from Scripps News
May 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond responds to the Center for AI Safety's statement that AI poses a "risk of extinction."
from The Steve Cochran Show WLS-AM 890
May 2023 Researchers with CASMI have found that a commonly used technique in machine learning (ML), which is meant to improve accuracy, is more likely to worsen fairness for historically disadvantaged groups.
May 2023 The 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) will be held June 12-15 at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago. CASMI-affiliated researchers are participating.
from Northwestern Computer Science
May 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond, professor of computer science at Northwestern University, said there are present problems we should address instead of focusing on existential risks.
from Chicago Tonight (WTTW)
May 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond discusses the future of artificial intelligence as the CEO of OpenAI testifies about the technology before Congress.
from NewsNation
May 2023 CASMI visiting researcher Francisco Iacobelli and his research team are creating an intelligent tutoring system for low-literacy Latina breast cancer survivors.
May 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond addresses the concerns and safety risks regarding artificial intelligence systems.
from Scripps News
April 2023 The Northwestern Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) is hosting a workshop on July 18-19 entitled, “Sociotechnical Approaches to Measurement and Validation for Safety in AI.”
April 2023 The Northwestern University Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D) hosted a virtual panel on April 7 entitled, “Thought Leaders on AI Education.” The discussion focused on what curriculums are available for students and teachers in all grade levels and how adults can also learn about AI systems and tools.
from AI@NU
April 2023 CASMI's virtual discussion focused on how businesses are using large language models like ChatGPT and how researchers are exploring the next developments of generative tools and investigating potential harms these systems could create.
March 2023 Ben Shneiderman, keynote speaker at CASMI's last workshop, produced a TechBrief entitled, "Safer Algorithmic Systems.” His hope is to convince the government and policy communities to make safer algorithmic systems a priority.
March 2023 Anyone can go to the AI Incident Database to report AI harms or near harms, which are then classified as AI incidents. The database currently has more than 2,400 reports of AI harms, resulting in more than 400 incidents.
March 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains how police departments can best use robots to help in dangerous work.
from Scripps News
March 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond explains why Meta's Casual Conversationsv2 is a solid first step but not a full solution.
from Popular Science
March 2023 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond joins the Steve Cochran Show to explain why schools shouldn't ban ChatGPT.
from The Steve Cochran Show
February 2023 The Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) at Northwestern University, a collaboration with the UL Research Institutes' Digital Safety Research Institute (DSRI), is providing $2.2 million in funding for eight new projects across seven institutions.
February 2023 CASMI hosted a workshop on Jan. 19 and 20 entitled, “Toward a Safety Science of AI.” Interdisciplinary thought leaders attended to share ideas on how we can define, measure, and anticipate safety in AI.
January 2023 Researchers with the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) have created a Human Impact Scorecard to assess and to demonstrate an artificial intelligence (AI) system’s impact on human well-being.
January 2023 CASMI director Kris Hammond appears on "Chicago Tonight" on WTTW to explain the benefits and the drawbacks of ChatGPT.
from WTTW
December 2022 Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have helped improve our lives, but they have also exposed people to harm. The solution requires a multipronged, inclusionary approach that focuses on developing a culture of safety, panelists told The Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) at Northwestern University.
November 2022 CASMI researchers have identified urban/rural disparities in crowd-sourced data and geographic data used in spatial intelligent technologies
October 2022 CASMI director, Kris Hammond, responds to the "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights" issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
from The Hill
October 2022 CASMI researchers developed a framework, called DANGER, that can generate dynamic stress tests for safety-critical systems.
October 2022 CASMI was named as one of the top 100 finalists for the 21st annual Chicago Innovation Awards
August 2022 Artificial intelligence systems can process vast amounts of data in seconds, but they can’t make sense of the world or explain their decisions. David Ferrucci wants to change that.
from New York Times
August 2022 The center seeks to fund new initiatives critical to furthering safety in intelligent systems
July 2022 Data-Driven Policing Workshop focused on the current landscape of data-driven policing, including best practices and implementation.
June 2022 CASMI Director Kristian Hammond participated in a panel discussion hosted by CASBS at Stanford University.
from Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)
April 2022 Ceremony featured remarks from Northwestern, Underwriters Laboratories leaders.
from McCormick Engineering
February 2022 Supported by Underwriters Laboratories, center will foster research that integrates safety into AI design.
from McCormick Engineering
