AIhub monthly digest: October 2024 – Nobel Prizes, the AI Song Contest, and towards safe and reliable AI agents

by Lucy Smith

29 October 2024

Interview with Pulkit Verma: Towards safe and reliable behavior of AI agents

In the latest in our series of interviews featuring the AAAI/ACM SIGAI doctoral consortium participants, we heard from Pulkit Verma about his research on safe and reliable behavior of AI agents. He is currently investigating the minimal set of requirements in an AI system that would enable a user to assess and understand the limits of its safe operability.

AIhub coffee corner: Is it the end of GenAI hype?

The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation. There has been a string of articles recently about the end of generative AI hype. Our experts consider whether or not the bubble has burst. Joining the conversation this time are: Tom Dietterich, Sabine Hauert, Michael Littman, and Marija Slavkovik.

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

The 2024 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) took place from 14-18 October in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Our Managing Editor, Lucy Smith, attended the event to give a science communication training session with Evan Ackerman from IEEE Spectrum. The session guided researchers on communicating their work via social media and blog posts, and gave some tips on dealing with media.

A milestone for the European Conference on AI

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the European Conference on AI (ECAI). The 27th edition was held from 19-24 October in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The programme featured technical papers, keynote and invited talks, workshops and tutorials, and panels. We give a flavour of the event in these two social media round-ups: Part 1 | Part 2. The proceedings from the conference are open access, and can be found here.

Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society

October proved a busy month for conferences, with the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) taking place from 21-23 October, in San Jose, California. The conference is designed to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss AI and its impact on society, ethical issues and challenges. The organisers awarded the best paper awards during the opening ceremony and you can see the winners here. The proceedings are available here.

Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry awarded for machine learning research

On 8 and 9 October respectively, the much-anticipated physics and chemistry Nobel Prizes for 2024 were announced. Both prizes celebrated machine learning-related research, with the physics prize going to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”, and the chemistry prize divided between David Baker (“for protein structure prediction”) and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction”. You can find out more about the awards, and links to the scientific background here.

AI Song Contest

Now in its fifth year, the grand finale of the 2024 AI Song Contest took place on 5 October in Zürich. The winning team was Onda Corta (comprising the Chilean duo Bernarda Castillo and Andrés Mondaca) with their song Sudamérica. You can listen to their entry and find out more about how they used AI models in the creative process here.

What is “best practice” when working with AI in the real world?

Working with AI in real-world conditions can be quite a different proposal to the idealised settings often discussed in theory. Anna Demming speaks to a panel of experts about how to meet “best practice” aspirations within real world constraints, and how to avoid common pitfalls.

AAAI call for educational videos

Are you interested in making a short video (2-3 minutes) about an aspect of AI for a general audience? AAAI is soliciting submissions to a new competition to help spread informative, accurate, and timely information about AI research and applications. Winning videos will be publicized by AAAI and shown on its website and at the annual AAAI conference. Find out more.

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