The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the Computers and Thought Award and the John McCarthy Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The winner of the 2025 Award for Research Excellence is Rina Dechter, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA . Professor Dechter is recognized for her seminal contributions to the fields of constraint satisfaction and probabilistic inference, including novel algorithmic frameworks, modeling ideas, complexity analyses, and unifying principles.

The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The award is given annually at the conference for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). This year, the AAAI Awards Committee has announced that the 2025 recipient of the award and 25,000 prize is Stuart J. Russell, "for his work on the conceptual and theoretical foundations of provably beneficial AI and his leadership in creating the field of AI safety". Stuart will give an invited talk at AAAI 2025 entitled "Can AI Benefit Humanity?" Stuart J. Russell is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the Michael H. Smith and Lotfi A. Zadeh Chair in Engineering.

AI experts from Berkeley and beyond will explore the ramifications of ChatGPT on science and society in a spring lecture series. Since its launch last November, the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has been an international sensation, with people using the platform to do everything from writing essays, computer code, poems and research proposals to planning vacations, flirting with Tinder matches and creating malware. According to UC Berkeley computer scientist Ken Goldberg, the computer program's facility with natural language -- particularly its ability to consistently demonstrate creativity -- is forcing many AI experts to rethink what machines may be capable of and even our understanding of intelligence. "ChatGPT may catalyze a paradigm shift," said Goldberg, the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering. "Something changed very dramatically with the performance of ChatGPT, compared with previous large language models, and everyone, including experts, is asking, 'What does it mean? Where do we go from here?'"

SDSC Director and Distinguished Professor of Physics Michael Norman is a member of the NAIRR Task Force. Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, Michael Norman has been appointed to the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force. This initiative announced recently by the Biden administration supports AI researchers' access to federal data in order to keep the U.S. at the forefront of emerging technology. "UC San Diego's faculty have a history of being called to contribute significantly to our nation's thought leadership on a variety of policy, economic, scientific and social issues," said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. "Professor Norman's expertise in the computer simulation of astronomical phenomena using supercomputers, and the development of the numerical methods to carry them out, will provide the NAIRR taskforce first-hand knowledge to better understand how researchers collaboratively use data analysis and cloud computing in their fields." According to the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, the NAIRR is envisioned as a shared computing and data infrastructure to provide AI researchers and students compute resources and high-quality data, along with appropriate educational tools and user support.

Another, newer option is deep brain stimulation, in which small pulses of electricity are delivered to the brain using an implanted electrode. If the implantation is successful, a patient's motor symptoms can be reduced significantly. This technology is made possible by an ever-growing understanding of brain anatomy and the roles played by its various parts. The subthalmic nucleus (STN), for example, is part of the basic movement circuitry in the brain. Pulses of electricity can disrupt this faulty firing.

When Avi Yagil, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California San Diego flew home from Europe in 2012, he thought he had caught a cold from his travels. When a "collection of pills" did not improve his symptoms, his wife encouraged him to see a doctor. Further tests revealed something far more life-threatening to Yagil than the common cold. "A chest X-Ray showed my lungs were flooded with fluid, and a subsequent echocardiogram found I had damage to my heart." Yagil was diagnosed with heart failure.

When Avi Yagil, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California San Diego flew home from Europe in 2012, he thought he had caught a cold from his travels. When a "collection of pills" did not improve his symptoms, his wife encouraged him to see a doctor. Further tests revealed something far more life-threatening to Yagil than the common cold. "A chest X-Ray showed my lungs were flooded with fluid, and a subsequent echocardiogram found I had damage to my heart." Yagil was diagnosed with heart failure.

Putting machine learning into production in the enterprise is not easy: Many organizations are struggling to implement the technology at scale. But it is possible to make the process of building, scaling, and deploying enterprise machine learning solutions repeatable and predictable. Join Tom Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College; Alex Breshears, senior product manager, Production Machine Learning, Cloudera; and Abbie Lundberg, business technology analyst, Lundberg Media for a discussion of the specific challenges enterprises face in machine learning and how they can create an end-to-end, factory-like capability. The content was created by the speakers of this event. The MIT Sloan Management Review editorial staff was not involved in the selection, development, or broadcast of this event.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. We don't typically think of the jobs that we perform as commodities. The Merriam-Webster entry on commodity describes it as "a mass-produced unspecialized product." But most of us view our jobs as specialized or somehow differentiated. We typically believe that we do them differently, and often better, than anyone else with the same job.