Senators on Tuesday got the green light to impose significant federal regulation on artificial intelligence systems, not just from two industry giants, but from an AI expert who warned that the fate of the nation may depend on tough AI rules from Congress. A Senate Judiciary subcommittee heard from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery, who both invited federal oversight of AI even though they split on whether a new federal agency is needed. In between those witnesses sat Gary Marcus, the New York University professor emeritus and leader of Uber's AI labs from 2016 to 2017, who issued a stark warning that human life is about to be upended by this unpredictable technology. "They can and will create persuasive lies at a scale humanity has never seen before," Marcus warned of generative AI systems. "Outsiders will use them to affect our elections, insiders to manipulate our markets and our political systems. Marcus warned that AI systems that do severe damage to humans' trust in each other have already been released and that the damage is already mounting. Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University, speaks during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, May 16, 2023. "A law professor, for example, was accused by a chatbot of sexual harassment.

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?'"

Writing the code to make a computer perform a particular job could be a Herculean task, back in the 1950s and 60s. "In the early 1950s, people did numerical computation by writing assembly language programs," says Alfred V. Aho, professor emeritus of computer science at Columbia University. "Assembly language is a language very close to the operations of a computer, and it's a deadly way to program. Of course, people can program at higher levels of abstraction, but that requires translating the higher-level language into a more basic set of instructions the machine can understand. Compilers that efficiently perform that translation exist nowadays in large part due to the work of Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. Their contribution to both the theory and practice of computer languages has earned them the 2020 ACM A.M. Turing Award. "Compilers are responsible for generating the software that the world uses today, these trillion ...

TOKYO, Sep 20, 2019 - (JCN Newswire) - Honda Foundation, the public interest incorporated foundation established by Soichiro Honda and his younger brother Benjiro and currently led by President Hiroto Ishida, is pleased to announce that the Honda Prize 2019 will be awarded to Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto and Chief Scientific Adviser of the Vector Institute for his pioneering research in the field of deep learning(1) in artificial intelligence (AI) and his contribution to practical application of the technology. The Honda Prize, established in 1980 and awarded once each year, is an international award that recognizes the work of individuals or groups generating new knowledge to drive the next generation, from the standpoint of eco-technology(2). Dr. Hinton has created a number of technologies that have enabled the broader application of AI, including the backpropagation algorithm(3) that forms the basis of the deep learning approach to AI. AI is expected to play an important role not only in the advancement of science and technology but also in resolving many different global issues that humankind must address in the areas of energy and climate change. The Prize will be awarded to Dr. Hinton for his outstanding achievements worthy of the highest recognition. This year marks the 40th award of the prize.

McCarthy, a past president of AAAI and an AAAI Fellow, helped design the foundation of today's internet-based computing and is widely credited with coining the term, artificial intelligence. This remembrance by Edward Feigenbaum, also a past president of AAAI and a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, was delivered at the celebration of John McCarthy's accomplishments, held at Stanford on 25 March 2012. Everyone knew everyone else, and saw them at the few conference panels that were held. At one of those conferences, I met John. We renewed contact upon his rearrival at Stanford, and that was to have major consequences for my professional life.

Artificial Life Researcher; Creator of Lucy, a Robot Babay Orangutan; Author, Creation: Life and How to Make It. Physicist, Universite' de la Mediterrane' (Marseille, France); Author: What is time?

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT who grew skeptical of artificial intelligence after creating a program that made many users feel like they were speaking with an empathic psychologist, died March 5 in Berlin. Weizenbaum, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany with his parents and arrived in the United States in the mid-1930s. At the beginning of his career with computers, in the early 1950s, he worked on analog computers; later, he helped design and build a digital computer at Wayne University in Detroit. In 1955, Weizenbaum became a member of the General Electric team that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations. Among his early technical contributions were the list processing system SLIP and the natural language understanding program ELIZA, which was an important development in artificial intelligence and cemented his role in the folklore of computer science research.

Robert Wilensky, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the campus's first faculty members in artificial intelligence when the field was just taking off, has died at age 61. He died at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland on Friday, March 15, of a bacterial infection. Wilensky's career at UC Berkeley spanned nearly 30 years, beginning in 1978 when he joined the faculty in computer science. He later was appointed a professor at the School of Information and Management Sciences (now the School of Information, or I School), which he helped form. His many research interests included the role of memory processes in natural language processing, language analysis and production and artificial intelligence in programming languages.

McCarthy created the term "artificial intelligence" and was a towering figure in computer science at Stanford most of his professional life. In his career, he developed the programming language LISP, played computer chess via telegraph with opponents in Russia and invented computer time-sharing. In 1966, John McCarthy hosted a series of four simultaneous computer chess matches carried out via telegraph against rivals in Russia. John McCarthy, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford, the man who coined the term "artificial intelligence" and subsequently went on to define the field for more than five decades, died suddenly at his home in Stanford in the early morning Monday, Oct. 24. McCarthy was a giant in the field of computer science and a seminal figure in the field of artificial intelligence.

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing the world's smallest machines, work that could revolutionize computer technology and lead to a new type of battery. Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, British-born Fraser Stoddart and Dutch scientist Bernard "Ben" Feringa share the 8 million kronor ( 930,000) prize for the "design and synthesis of molecular machines," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Machines at the molecular level are 1,000th the width of a human hair and have taken chemistry to a new dimension, the academy said. Molecular machines "will most likely be used in the development of things such as new materials, sensors and energy storage systems." Stoddart has already developed a molecule-based computer chip with 20 kB memory.