Machine learning & AI news

Machine learning & AI

AI agents can build consensus on a scale humans can't

Everyone is familiar with the situation: A larger group of people plans to visit a restaurant together, but it can take time and sometimes a great deal of patience to agree on a time and place to meet. The better the participants ...

Engineering

AI could help design cities, but planners need safeguards

AI is showing up in nearly every aspect of daily life—from internet searches to visits to the doctor's office. It could one day even play a role in the street layout in front of your apartment building.

Robotics

Robots learn new skills from a single video—in just 29 seconds

To operate reliably in dynamic real-world settings, robots should be able to acquire new skills quickly without undergoing extensive additional training. Most existing robotic systems, however, primarily perform well on the ...

Automotive

Attention-grabbing virtual agents could help improve safety of self-driving cars

Animated "virtual agents" could help keep the roads of the future safer by alerting people behind the wheel of semiautonomous cars to oncoming hazards, new research suggests.

Machine learning & AI

AI helps turn citizen photos into water-level data

For the past 15 years, Christopher Lowry, Ph.D., has led CrowdHydrology, a University at Buffalo citizen-science project that relies on thousands of volunteers to collect water-level observations from streams and other waterways ...

Machine learning & AI

Q&A: Promise and perils of agentic AI

Chatbots and large language models can execute a seemingly countless number of tasks, from writing emails and reports to generating code and analyzing data. However, they still primarily act only in response to user prompts ...

Security

How attackers persuade AI agents to break the rules

Today, most of us interact with AI assistants—reactive bots that wait for human instructions. Yet AI assistants are rapidly being replaced by agentic AI agents that can interact with external tools, browse the web, generate ...

Machine learning & AI

OpenAI says ads are coming to ChatGPT in Europe next week

European users of ChatGPT's free and low-cost artificial intelligence agents will start seeing ads Aug. 24 as its creator, OpenAI, expands its plan to extract more revenue from its models.

Machine learning & AI

China goes rural with data centers in quest to power AI

In China's hilly Guizhou province, a cluster of European-style buildings complete with a clock tower and a multi-arched bridge emits a low, permanent hum—a clue to its unexpected identity as tech giant Huawei's largest data ...

Computer Sciences

Hidden goals can undermine AI teamwork, study finds

Large language models (LLMs), the computational models that underpin conversational agents such as Gemini and ChatGPT, are now widely used by people worldwide to rapidly find information, summarize documents and generate ...

Machine learning & AI

Meta chases OpenAI, Anthropic with new AI coding app

Meta entered the race for automated coding tools Wednesday when it announced a new app for developers of artificial intelligence products, competing with other major AI labs for customers and revenue.

Machine learning & AI

AI has been stepping out of bounds. Should you be worried?

The robots aren't revolting, but they're starting to freelance … or so it seems. Recent weeks have seen several high-profile instances of AI going off the leash in ways that have raised alarms among security experts and the ...

Energy & Green Tech

Low-power AI chip cuts drone identification energy use by 88.7%

Doyeon Kim, an undergraduate researcher in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, has published a paper in an academic journal. The research focuses on implementing drone artificial intelligence (AI) identification ...

Business

Will companies ever be run by an AI CEO?

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has speculated about how long it will take for artificial intelligence to replace senior leadership teams in organizations. "Shame on me," Altman told the Conversations with Tyler podcast in November ...

Engineering

Generative AI: Modeling a proper cuppa from a proper pot

The Yixing Zisha teapot sits neatly at the intersection of art, engineering and heritage. As such, it makes for an intriguing test case for a technology increasingly taking on creative tasks across almost every field of human ...

Computer Sciences

AI learns to focus like humans to speed up video analysis

Artificial neural networks were originally inspired by the human brain, but they are still far less efficient at processing information. One reason the human brain is so efficient is its ability to focus only on the most ...

Machine learning & AI

Q&A: Harnessing statistics to improve personalized medicine

Scientific advancements—including understanding health conditions and developing new treatments—hinge on data and its implications. Statistician Alex Luedtke is developing new methods to make data analysis as efficient and ...