Recent News
Media Mention: "The Danger of Dishonest Anthropomorphism in Chatbot Design"
Designing technology to "act" like a person or have human features can have many benefits, but it can also be manipulative and exploitative.
Patrick Plaisance, CSRAI affiliate and Davis Professor in Ethics in Penn State's Bellisario College of Communications gives his perspective in this piece for Psychology Today.
Competition helps expose demographic and cultural biases in generative AI tools
Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence announced the winners of its first-ever “Bias-a-thon.” The competition, held Nov. 13–16, asked Penn Staters to identify prompts that led popular generative AI tools to produce biased or stereotype-reinforcing outputs.
Health data, faster: Wearable stretchy sensor can process, predict health data
Engineering researchers, led by Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, the James L. Henderson, Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State, created a machine learning platform that can more efficiently analyze and predict data points collected by wearables.
Penn Staters invited to compete to find bias in generative AI tools
Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence will host “Bias-a-thon,” a competition to expose biases in current-day AI tools. The virtual event will take place from Monday, Nov. 13, to Thursday, Nov. 16, and is open to anyone with an active Penn State email address.
Media Mention: "AI ‘Companion’ Robots: The Next Must-Have Health Tech?"
Companion robots are becoming increasingly acceptable and even appealing as they provide companionship to older adults, help school-aged children learn, and share important reminders as health coaches.
In this article from WebMD, CSRAI director S. Shyam Sundar shares his perspective on the benefits and potential challenges of companion robots.
Video: "Revolutionizing Maternal Health in Kenya: The Power of AI in SMS Triage"
In 2018, Kenya faced a staggering 36,000 maternal and neonatal deaths due to limited access to quality maternal health care. Enter Jacaranda Health's game-changing solution: PROMPTS. This SMS-based system allows pregnant women, even in remote areas, to send messages about their health and receive quick answers. However, with over 1.1 million messages monthly, how can every message be addressed promptly and accurately? Dive into this video to discover TRIM-AI, an advanced AI that can predict the urgency of a mother's medical condition just from her SMS, ensuring that those in critical need are prioritized.
The project is led by Amulya Yadav, CSRAI Affiliate and assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology.
Media Mention: "Can You Hide a Child’s Face From A.I.?"
Parents have been stressing out for at least two decades about what to share about their children online. Powerful new technologies present a more urgent risk.
In this article from The New York Times, CSRAI Affiliate Priya Kumar shares her perspective on how parents can work with their kids to keep them safe online.
Nature.com: How to stop AI deepfakes from sinking society — and science
Deceptive videos and images created using generative AI could sway elections, crash stock markets and ruin reputations. Researchers are developing methods to limit their harm.
In this article from Nature.com, CSRAI director Shyam Sundar speaks on how to harness the powers of generative AI for good, while developing tools to guard against the bad.
Center for Socially Responsible AI invites seed funding proposals
The Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence invites short proposals for its annual seed funding program. Penn State faculty are can submit proposals for research that advance the center's mission of promoting, practicing and studying socially responsible ways of using, building and deploying AI technology.
College of Information Sciences and Technology welcomes nine new faculty members
The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology has welcomed nine new faculty members in 2023. The two tenure-line members and seven non-tenure-line members represent the college’s four research areas: data sciences and artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, privacy and security, and social and organizational informatics.
WPSU: Penn State Professor Shyam Sundar on the use of AI tools in education
CSRAI Director S. Shyam Sundar shares his perspective with WPSU on the benefits and challenges of using AI tools in education.
Psychology Today: Chatbots Are a Valuable Tool—and a Moral Test for Us All
Originally written by CSRAI Affiliate Patrick Plaisance for Psychology Today.
"Generative AI” tools promise to provide us with many good things, but they also provide us with something else: a moral test of sorts.
We may well be on our way to failing the moral test posed by chatbots by ignoring the lessons of our response to the burgeoning dominance of social media that began 20 years ago.
New York Times: How Easy Is It to Fool A.I.-Detection Tools?
CSRAI Director S. Shyam Sundar shares his perspective in the New York Times on the fast-burgeoning crop of companies that are offering services to detect AI-generated images to help society separate fact from fiction.
Center for Socially Responsible AI awards Big Ideas Grants to five projects
The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence awarded more than $212,000 to advance five interdisciplinary research projects as part of its Big Ideas Grant program. Awarded projects feature researchers from six departments across four colleges and institutes.
Transparent labeling of training data may boost trust in artificial intelligence
Showing users that visual data fed into artificial intelligence (AI) systems was labeled correctly might make people trust AI more, according to researchers. The findings may also pave the way to help scientists better measure the connection between labeling credibility, AI performance and trust.