AIhub monthly digest: December 2023 – attending NeurIPS, generating 3d models of blood vessels, and the Wizard of AI

Welcome to our final monthly digest of 2023, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we take a look back at NeurIPS 2023, generate 3d models of blood vessels, and find out more about the energy cost of AI deployment.

AIhub at NeurIPS2023

The thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) took place in New Orleans from Sunday 10 to Saturday 16 December. The event was vast, with over 13,000 people in attendance at the venue, and a further 3,000 tuning in virtually. We attempted to capture what participants got up to in these tweet round-ups: Part one | Part two.

On the Monday, we delivered an introduction to science communication for AI researchers. It was great to see so much interest in this, with an excellent turnout both for the talk and the drop-in session that followed.

During the official opening, the winners of the outstanding paper awards were announced. Click here to find out who won awards in the categories: outstanding main track paper, outstanding datasets and benchmark track paper, and the test of time award.

Generating 3d models of blood vessels

In their work VesselVAE: Recursive Variational Autoencoders for 3D Blood Vessel Synthesis, Paula Feldman and colleagues present a data-driven generative framework for synthesizing blood vessel 3D geometry. We asked Paula about this work, the methodology, and why this is such an interesting area for study.

Assured and Trustworthy Human-centered AI – a AAAI Fall symposium

The AAAI Fall Symposium Series took place in Arlington, USA, and comprised seven different symposia. One of these was the symposium on Assured and Trustworthy Human-centered AI (ATHAI). In this blogpost, organisers Brian Hu and Ariel Kapusta and Tabitha Colter summarise the highlights from this event, which brought together stakeholders from industry, academia, and government to discuss issues related to AI assurance in different domains.

EU AI Act provisionally passed

Following three days of talks, the EU parliament have reached a provisional agreement on the artificial intelligence act. The draft regulation aims to ensure that AI systems placed on the European market and used in the EU are “safe and respect fundamental rights and EU values”. You can read the 217 page proposal here.

100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics

Since 2018, Women in AI Ethics has published an annual “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” list. This year was no different, and, in their 2023 list, they highlight 100 women making important contributions to this critical space.

Watts driving the cost of AI deployment?

In their paper Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Yacine Jernitea and Emma Strubell calculate the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks. Melissa Heikkilä casts her eye over the research in this article in MIT Technology Review.

The Wizard of AI – a film by Alan Warburton

One of the highlights of the recent Open Data Institute (ODI) Summit 2023 was the showing of a short film by artist and AI collaborator, Alan Warburton. This video essay was commissioned by the ODI‘s Data as Culture programme and addresses the cultural impacts of generative AI. You can watch it here.

Looking back at 2023

Over the course of the year, we’ve had the pleasure of working with many talented researchers from across the globe. As 2023 draws to a close, we’ve collected some of the excellent blog posts from our contributors. Amongst other things, you can find out how to mitigate bias in machine learning, read about the complementary features of symbolic and deep-learning methods, and discover what solving a Sudoku puzzle has to do with protein design.

Our resources page
Forthcoming and past seminars for 2023
AI around the world focus series
UN SDGs focus series
New voices in AI series

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.