EU chief von der Leyen proposes'associate member' status for Canada Share EU chief von der Leyen proposes'associate member' status for Canada on social media European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has raised the prospect of Canada becoming the 27-nation European Union's first "associate member", a striking overture as both seek to pivot away from a hostile United States under President Donald Trump. Von der Leyen's statement on Wednesday came after Prime Minister Mark Carney said earlier this week that Canada was seeking a "unique alliance" with the EU, but not membership. "I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU," von der Leyen told Carney, who was attending her annual keynote speech. The first foreign head of government to attend the annual "State of the European Union" address, his visit comes in advance of an EU-Canada summit in Montreal next month. Carney will deliver his own address to the European Parliament on Thursday.

And what that came with for me was an absolute terror of quitting the day job, because there is no safety net. I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal. I became an assistant in New York. I had a really great job for a long time at The Rockefeller University. I was an admin in a cancer research lab, and I loved that. It was such a pleasure to be surrounded by such smart people doing interesting work, and the health insurance was incredible. I kept that job until a year after came out.

Alarm bells within the company should have stopped model training from going forward. By now you've probably heard about last month's major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a test. On Wednesday, OpenAI released a postmortem technical report on the incident, which I wrote about here . The day before OpenAI released that report, I spoke with David Krueger, a computer science professor and prominent alignment expert who took leave from the University of Montreal to found and lead an AI safety nonprofit called Evitable. He said what he had really hoped to see in the report was an analysis of the human factors behind the incident. "When you look at accidents and incidents, oftentimes people try to find the technical source of failure, but that can give a very inaccurate and misleading sense of why the failure occurred," he said.

Dr François Pachet is an AI researcher and musician, and one of the most influential figures in AI and music. His innovative contributions have defined the field over the past decades through creative systems such as the Continuator, and Flow Machines, among others. After leading the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab and the Sony Computer Science Lab, he went on to create his own companies: Imagine All The People and Ynosound. In the context of IJCAI2025, he spoke about what deep learning changed, and what still remains wide open. He explains why tools like Suno and Udio--ChatGPT-like platforms for music generation--can produce astonishing results that still feel unsatisfying; why the next step for music generation requires combining sampling with search; and why the most important problems in artistic domains are, by nature, ill-defined--because there is no loss function to determine what is "good". Above all, he defends the importance of researcher autonomy: work on the questions that genuinely fascinate you, even when they fall outside prevailing trends--perhaps especially then. Thank you for joining me for this interview. Could you begin by telling us when was your first IJCAI and a memory related to it? I think the first IJCAI I attended was in Montreal in '95. I was there for a couple of workshops, one of them was about music and AI, and the other one I think was on advisor systems, something like that. And I remember there was a French colleague who was there also, at the time he was doing his PhD. And there was this researcher called Herbert Simon, who is a Nobel Prize pioneer of AI. I remember having chatted a little bit with this French guy who was very bold, and he just went up to Simon, said "Hey," and he started a conversation with him. And I was very impressed by the fact that you could meet those kinds of guys informally in a corridor or something at this conference.

The latest interview in our series with the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants features Thi Kieu Khanh Ho who is studying time-series anomaly detection. We found out more about her research, and what inspired her to study AI, and what she plans to work on next. Tell us a bit about your PhD -- where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am doing my PhD at McGill University and Mila - Québec AI Institute, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, supervised by Professor Narges Armanfard. My research focuses on time-series anomaly detection, the problem of teaching AI systems to recognize when something unusual or abnormal is happening in complex, real-world data streams, without relying on large amounts of labeled examples.

This work introduces a novel approach, Pairwise Epistemic Estimators (PairEpEsts), for epistemic uncertainty estimation in ensemble models for regression tasks using pairwise-distance estimators (PaiDEs). By utilizing the pairwise distances between model components, PaiDEs establish bounds on entropy. We leverage this capability to enhance the performance of Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD). Notably, unlike sample-based Monte Carlo estimators, PairEpEsts can estimate epistemic uncertainty up to 100 times faster and demonstrate superior performance in higher dimensions. To validate our approach, we conducted a varied series of regression experiments on commonly used benchmarks: 1D sinusoidal data, Pendulum, Hopper, Ant, and Humanoid, demonstrating PairEpEsts' advantage over baselines in high-dimensional regression active learning.

The authors would like to thank Ulrich-Michael, Frances, James, Maryam, and Mandolyn for their help in labeling the dataset. The work at the Université de Montréal was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (Paull), an NSERCPGS DScholarship (Morin) and an FRQNT Doctoral Scholarship (Morin). Moreover, this research was enabled in part by compute resources provided by Mila (mila.quebec). The work at the University of Freiburg was funded by an academic grant from NVIDIA. The work at the University of Oxford was supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (Fallon, Kassab), a Sellafield Robotics and AICentre of Excellence Grant, and EPSRCC2CGrant EP/Z531212/1 (Mattamala), and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT)(No.

Mother sues OpenAI in US after daughter's death linked to ChatGPT use Alice Carrier had recently started playing the guitar again, a hobby she enjoyed in high school but had set aside during college. It was one of several pursuits she filled her free time with as she interviewed for new jobs, spent time with her dog and enjoyed activities, including gaming. By all appearances, at least to her mother, Kristie Carrier, things were going well. Alice was working as a web developer in Montreal, Canada, fulfilling a dream she had carried since growing up in the small town of Lawrence, New Brunswick. But what Carrier did not know was how much her daughter was struggling in silence.

The 2007 Mountaineers remain college football's greatest'what-if' story nearly two decades later AB Hernandez advances in California state championship as Save Girls' Sports activists rally nearby Tennis player Rafael Jodar accused of pushing French Open ball girl, but did he really? Steve Hilton rips Steyer for trans athlete support, leads'Save Girls Sports' rally at track title meet Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Oregon father issues plea as legislation could free daughter's murderer Rachel Campos-Duffy: AOC driven by'Marxist mindset,' a'true believer' Spencer Pratt responds to Newsom's Bass endorsement, calls them'alleged criminal partners' Speaker Johnson outlines plan to defeat'socialist and extremist' Democrats Trump set for'final determination' on Iran nuclear deal The Stanley Cup Final matchup is set after the Carolina Hurricanes put away the Montreal Canadiens in a dominant Game 5 performance, and they will now take on the Vegas Golden Knights. But we have a problem: neither the Hurricanes nor the Golden Knights touched their respective conference championship trophies. This superstition is going to fail for someone. The Vegas Golden Knights and Carolina Hurricanes both steered clear of their conference championship trophies because of a superstition, but it can't work out for both of them.

Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Greg Sankey insists SEC is'strongest league' despite Big Ten winning three straight national championships Phillies look to upset Dodgers behind Zack Wheeler as Philadelphia's turnaround continues in LA Joey McGuire calls Steve Sarkisian's bluff, dares Texas to play Texas Tech in Week 1 Rams troublemaker WR Puka Nacua says he's a changed man after biting incident and stint in rehab Chiefs have no plans to release Rashee Rice and see jail time as a'life lesson' opportunity Diamondbacks fans catch same player's home run on back-to-back nights after showing up on the wrong date Dr Oz: Is this a flaw or a feature? Father Mike Schmitz: Pope Leo XIV wants this world view in line with humanity's good Pompeo warns Iran will rebuild nuclear facilities'the moment' it gets the chance Purple Heart recipient speaks out after Graham Platner's controversial remarks'Chipotle Karen' caught hurling burrito bowl at worker's face The Carolina Hurricanes are in the Eastern Conference Final for the second straight season and the fourth of Rod Brind'Amour's tenure behind the bench, and they've got the chance to close things out in Game 5 against the Montreal Canadiens. Of course, teams coming into Game 5 with a 3-1 lead are historically almost guaranteed to move on to the Stanley Cup Final; the Canes are not going to get ahead of their skis. Hurricanes forward Jackson Blake, who scored the OT-winner to sweep the Philadelphia Flyers and send Carolina to the conference final, talked about the need to focus on the game tonight and not start thinking ahead to the Western Conference Champion Vegas Golden Knights. It's exciting for sure, Blake said.