Recent news about AI safety is fueling a new wave of political and societal fear.聽Five UW AI researchers discuss the real risks of AI and what to do about them.
Engineering
黑料老司机 researchers gathered eight kids on campus to explore how they played with AI toys. The kids initially were curious, asking introductory questions, such as 鈥淲hat is your name?鈥� But after communication breakdowns, the kids turned to antagonizing the toys, calling them 鈥渦gly鈥� and 鈥渆vil鈥� and joking about throwing them in the ocean.
Explore recent research from the 黑料老司机: nectar-stealing Hawaiian honeycreepers, ChatGPT and anxious attachment, the cost of nursing for marine mammals, new magnetic nanomaterials, and a new strategy to subdue finicky plasma.
Hossein Naghavi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UW, explores new applications for an underused segment of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the 鈥渢erahertz band.鈥� Naghavi recently received a grant from the Department of Energy to create powerful yet lightweight sensors using terahertz waves, which could aid emergency responders, autonomous vehicles, security systems and more.
Explore recent research from the 黑料老司机: a new AI framework for developing advanced materials, a test of climate models鈥� ability to predict temperature trends, and the role of paternal body odor in brain-to-brain synchrony with infants.
黑料老司机 researchers created the Landslide Exposure Database, the first resource that maps per-building landslide vulnerability across the United States. The study estimates that roughly 6.5 million U.S. residents are highly vulnerable to landslides, and overturns the conventional picture of landslide risk in the U.S. by identifying high concentrations of exposure in Appalachia as well as a surprising urban-rural divide.
Explore recent research from the 黑料老司机: low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately impacted by air pollution, an unfathomably fast chemical reaction, ups and downs in the methane record, and the cigar galaxy pictured at high resolution.
A UW team studied seven popular agentic AI browsers and found that four create ways for malicious actors to bypass a fundamental cybersecurity protocol called the 鈥渟ame-origin policy,鈥� which makes websites open in a browser unable to interact with each other鈥檚 information. Researchers ran a successful proof-of-concept cyberattack on one browser.
A UW team built an AI tool that helps users turn research papers into 45-second videos. A researcher uploads a paper to the tool, which uses Google Gemini to write a short script explaining the paper. The researcher can then iteratively edit the transcript and resulting video clip.
New computing techniques 鈥� including AI and quantum computing 鈥� are enabling UW researchers to design unique and complex quantum materials.
黑料老司机 researchers launched a pilot app that maps 鈥榣ittle free pantries鈥� throughout the Seattle area and gives pantry users and donors new tools to communicate with and help one another.
Discovery Days gives K-12 students from across Washington state a chance to experience science and engineering concepts for themselves at the 黑料老司机’s Seattle campus.
黑料老司机 researchers created BikeButler, a demo web app that lets users find personalized bike routes in Seattle. Cyclists plug in their destination and origin 鈥� just like in other mapping apps 鈥� and can then toggle sliders for eight attributes to create personalized route options.
UW News spoke with Paul Wiggins, a 黑料老司机 associate professor of both physics and bioengineering, to learn about a surprisingly relatable behavior prompting bacteria to stockpile huge reserves of essential proteins.
黑料老司机 researchers developed a system called VueBuds that uses tiny cameras in off-the-shelf wireless earbuds to allow users to talk with an AI model about the scene in front of them. For instance, a user might look at a Korean food package and say, 鈥淗ey VueBuds, translate this for me.鈥� They鈥檇 then hear an AI voice say, 鈥淭he visible text translates to 鈥楥old Noodles鈥� in English.
At the brand-new Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab, researchers from across the UW probe the 鈥渟pooky鈥� mysteries of quantum phenomena.
New research shows that as winters get warmer, more icy crusts may form within snowpacks in much of the Pacific Northwest, increasing the risk of avalanche in some areas and changing the behavior of wildlife across the region.
Researchers at UW and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are simulating something in the lab that they hope will rarely happen in the wild: a collision between underwater turbines and marine animals.
Forest managers in the eastern Cascades selectively thin forests to promote wildfire resilience. New research from the UW shows that the same process can also increase seasonal snowpack, providing some relief to drought-prone areas throughout central Washington.
A team led by 黑料老司机 researchers has created DopFone, a system that uses an off-the-shelf smartphone鈥檚 existing speaker and microphone to accurately estimate fetal heart rate. The phone mimics a Doppler ultrasound, emitting a tone and listening for the subtle variations in its echo caused by fetal heart beats. A machine learning model then estimates the heart rate.
A UW and Ai2 research team built OpenScholar, an open-source AI model designed specifically to synthesize current scientific research. In tests, OpenScholar cited sources as accurately as human experts, and 16 scientists preferred its response to those written by subject experts 51% of the time.
A new smart glove from the UW Wearable Intelligence Lab could help physical therapy patients track progress and train robotic hands to grasp.
Lucas Meza, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the 黑料老司机, started his lab to build a new generation of tough and light nanomaterials inspired by natural materials like wood, shell and bone. Instead, he discovered 鈥渂ig gaps鈥� in our basic understanding of what makes a material tough or brittle. Meza spoke to UW News about his strange and surprising journey into the nano realm.
New research from the UW and the Toyota Research Institute explores how drivers trade off between cognitive tasks, driving and using the vehicle’s touch screen. Researchers placed participants in a driving simulator and had them complete memory tests while interacting with the simulator鈥檚 touch screen.
A new 黑料老司机 study suggests that AI could learn cultural values by observing human behavior, similar to how children learn by watching and interacting with adults. Researchers had AI systems observe two cultural groups playing a video game. The AI systems were able to learn each group鈥檚 degree of altruism and apply this to a new situation.
Researchers at the UW have developed AI-powered headphones that automatically isolate conversation partners in a noisy soundscape. The system employs AI models that listen for the back-and-forth pattern of conversation and mute voices that aren鈥檛 following the established rhythm.
Researchers at the UW have created a recyclable, flexible and self-healing composite material that could replace traditional circuit boards in future generations of wearable electronics.
Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint precise areas of the body can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful 鈥渙ff target鈥� effects. Researchers at the UW took a significant step toward that goal by designing proteins with autonomous decision-making capabilities. By adding smart tail structures to therapeutic proteins, the team demonstrated that the proteins could be 鈥減rogrammed鈥� to act based on the presence of specific environmental cues.
UW researchers discuss their study which surveyed 166 gamers about how video games sparked meaningful changes in their lives.
New research from the UW tested how much a car owner鈥檚 perception of public charger reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The results were dramatic: Participants with a negative view of public charging were far less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view.
In her new book, Katharina Reinecke explores how “digital culture shock” manifests in the world, in ways innocuous and sometimes harmful.聽
In a recent paper, 黑料老司机 researchers argue that a key standard for deploying medical AI is transparency 鈥� that is, using various methods to clarify how a medical AI system arrives at its diagnoses and outputs.
New research led by the 黑料老司机 provides clear evidence that highly walkable areas lead to significantly more walking. Authors compared the steps per day of 5,424 people who moved one or more times among 1,609 U.S. cities. Across all relocations, when the Walk Score rose or fell more than 48 points, average steps increased or decreased by about 1,100 per day.
Antimicrobial resistance is a lurking threat in hospitals around the world. As more strains of bacteria and other microbes evolve defenses against available drugs, more patients run the risk of contracting infections that defy treatment. Now, 黑料老司机 researchers offer new insights into measures currently used to control the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria and other infectious agents in health care facilities.
黑料老司机 researchers recruited self-identifying Democrats and Republicans to make political decisions with help from three versions of ChatGPT: a base model, one with liberal bias and one with conservative bias. Democrats and Republicans were both likelier to lean in the direction of the biased chatbot they were talking with than those participants who interacted with the base model.
UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics Jim Hermanson took a ride Wednesday morning aboard a U.S. Navy Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet 鈥� better known as one of the Blue Angels.聽
Researchers at the 黑料老司机 and Microsoft developed a new type of low-carbon concrete by mixing dried, powdered seaweed with cement. The seaweed-fortified cement has a 21% lower global warming potential while retaining its strength.
黑料老司机 researchers developed the game AI Puzzlers to show kids an area where AI systems still typically and blatantly fail: solving certain reasoning puzzles. In the game, users get a chance to solve puzzles by completing patterns of colored blocks. They can then ask various AI chatbots to solve and have the systems explain their solutions 鈥� which they nearly always fail to do accurately.
In 2023, 黑料老司机 researchers recruited a group of 29 laid-off U.S. tech workers to discuss the effects of recent mass layoffs on employees. Overall, the group was ambivalent about tech work. They said it was often unfulfilling, despite their plans to continue in the industry.
UW researchers designed a headphone system that translates several people speaking at once, following them as they move and preserving the direction and qualities of their voices. The team built the system, called Spatial Speech Translation, with off-the-shelf noise-cancelling headphones fitted with microphones.