In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. In this latest interview, we hear from Debalina Padariya and hear about her work on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, why this is such an interesting area for study, the different projects she's been involved in so far during her PhD, and her experience at the Doctoral Consortium at AAAI 2025. I am currently pursuing a PhD at De Montfort University, UK, supported by the prestigious Alan Turing Institute and Accenture Strategic Partnership Program. My research primarily focuses on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, while designing a framework to quantify the privacy/utility trade-offs in generative model-driven synthetic datasets. Although Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) is one of the emerging use cases of generative AI, potential privacy attacks associated with generative models emerge as critical issues.

People may not be willing to pay for AI, but they're certainly willing to use it. How they use AI, though, seems to be changing. A new study from consultancy Accenture reveals some insights into how consumers perceive and use AI, and it's seen as a lot more than just a tool for work. Instead, AI is becoming a personal influencer that users want to have a relationship with. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The numbers from this study show that as AI improves, people are rapidly trusting it with their personal lives.

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Around midnight on April 16, 2025, after Chen Zimo learned that the Department of Homeland Security had threatened to revoke Harvard University's certification to enroll international students, he began communicating with a trusted source about possible legal scenarios. Chen, a Chinese citizen, still needed a number of courses before he could complete his degree in computer science at Harvard, and he felt panicked about the possibility of having his visa revoked. For him, the Harvard experience had been transformative. Chen--not his real name--had grown up in provincial China, where his family had modest resources and sent him to public schools. He could never have afforded Harvard without the university's generous financial support, and he had also received funding for summer language study.

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Russian forces have been using drones to hunt and attack civilians in Ukraine and continue to do so, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). In a report released on Tuesday, HRW stated that the Russian military has repeatedly deployed unmanned drones to attack civilian targets in its more than three-year war with Ukraine. The NGO said that dozens of civilians have been killed and hundreds injured in violation of the laws of war. Referencing video from Russian drones and witnesses and survivors, the rights watchdog alleges that Russia has "deliberately or recklessly" hunted civilians and civilian objects, particularly in the southern city of Kherson, using "commercially available quadcopter drones" made domestically and in China. "Russian drone operators are able to track their targets, with high-resolution video feeds, leaving little doubt that the intent is to kill, maim, and terrify civilians," Belkis Wille, a director on arms and conflict at HRW, said in a statement.

It was, of course, not so simple. After speaking with dozens of researchers, we realized that the common understanding of AI's energy appetite is full of holes. I encourage you to read the full story, which has some incredible graphics to help you understand everything from the energy used in a single query right up to what AI will require just three years from now (enough electricity to power 22% of US households, it turns out). But here are three takeaways I have after the project. We focused on measuring the energy requirements that go into using a chatbot, generating an image, and creating a video with AI.

On June 3, Yoshua Bengio, the world's most-cited computer scientist, announced the launch of LawZero, a nonprofit that aims to create "safe by design" AI by pursuing a fundamentally different approach to major tech companies. Players like OpenAI and Google are investing heavily in AI agents--systems that not only answer queries and generate images, but can craft plans and take actions in the world. The goal of these companies is to create virtual employees that can do practically any job a human can, known in the tech industry as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Executives like Google DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis point to AGI's potential to solve climate change or cure disease as a motivator for its development. Bengio, however, says we don't need agentic systems to reap AI's rewards--it's a false choice.

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. "I've only written nine," he says. "Always eager to please, it decided to invent three." The "nine inches" from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem.