The use of AI technologies is percolating into the secure development of software-based systems, with an increasing trend of composing AI-based subsystems (with uncertain levels of performance) into automated pipelines. This presents a fundamental research challenge and poses a serious threat to safety-critical domains (e.g., aviation). Despite the existing knowledge about uncertainty in risk analysis, no previous work has estimated the uncertainty of AI-augmented systems given the propagation of errors in the pipeline. We provide the formal underpinnings for capturing uncertainty propagation, develop a simulator to quantify uncertainty, and evaluate the simulation of propagating errors with two case studies. We discuss the generalizability of our approach and present policy implications and recommendations for aviation. Future work includes extending the approach and investigating the required metrics for validation in the aviation domain.

Donald Trump's former "fixer," Michael Cohen, used Google Bard to cite made-up legal cases that ended up in a federal court. The New York Times reported Friday that Cohen admitted in unsealed court papers that he passed on documents referencing bogus cases to his lawyer, who then relayed them to a federal judge. Cohen reportedly wrote in the sworn declaration he hadn't stayed on top of "emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology." Cohen's legal team filed the paperwork in a motion asking for an early end to court supervision from his 2018 campaign finance case, for which he served three years in prison. After Cohen's attorney, David M. Schwartz, presented the legal documents to the federal court, Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Federal District Court said he was having trouble finding the three decisions cited by Schwartz (via Cohen).

It started not with a stroke of creative genius, but with a rain barrel that Mike Evans '99, MEng '00, wanted to install in his garden. Fourteen calls later, he still hadn't been able to hire anyone. He started researching the home maintenance sector and discovered that many US trade schools have closed in recent decades, creating a shortage of handypeople. That's how Fixer was born. "What it comes down to is there aren't enough people to do the work," says Evans, who founded Fixer in 2017.