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.
Technology
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.
AI systems such as Google鈥檚 Gemini Storybook now let parents or teachers conjure illustrated, personalized kids stories. UW researchers found that when six leading AI models made stories about talking animals, 57% of characters were either gender neutral or ungendered, 41% were male, and just 2% were female.
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.
A 黑料老司机-led research team created GovScape, an efficient search system for PDFs from the End of Term Web Archive. Users can look up exact keywords, like 鈥淔AFSA,鈥� or use semantic search, which finds documents on a topic even if the exact search terms don鈥檛 appear on the page. Because researchers used highly efficient artificial intelligence models, processing the 10 million PDFs hosted online during Donald Trump鈥檚 first term costs less than $1,500, or about $1 per 47,000 pages.
黑料老司机 researchers developed an artificial intelligence system that automatically estimates the environmental impacts of making different electronic devices. The system takes only a minute to run and achieves estimates with accuracy similar to human experts鈥�.
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.
Katie Davis, a UW professor in the Information School, discusses a study in which she and a team of researchers interviewed 22 teachers about AI use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has issued its first real-time alerts of changes in the night sky. The ultrafast alerting system, developed at the UW, will eventually detect up to seven million changes in the cosmos every night and notify scientists around the world.
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.
UW researchers analyzed the checkout data from the last 20 years of the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of 鈥淭he Norton Anthology of American Literature,鈥� which is assigned in U.S. English classes more than any other anthology. Sci-fi was especially popular.
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.
A web-based method was shown to mitigate political polarization on X by nudging antidemocratic and extremely negative partisan posts lower in a user鈥檚 feed. The tool, which is independent of the platform, has the potential to give users more say over what they see on social media.
In a new UW study, 528 participants worked with simulated AI systems to select job candidates. The researchers simulated different levels of racial biases for resumes from white, Black, Hispanic and Asian men. Without suggestions, participants鈥� choices exhibited little bias. But when provided with recommendations, participants mirrored the AI鈥檚 biases.
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.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, 鈥渇or the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.鈥� Clarke, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborates with the Axion Dark Matter Experiment at the 黑料老司机.
UW researchers discuss their study which surveyed 166 gamers about how video games sparked meaningful changes in their lives.
In her new book, Katharina Reinecke explores how “digital culture shock” manifests in the world, in ways innocuous and sometimes harmful.聽
A 黑料老司机-led study of X found that posts with Community Notes attached were less prone to going viral and got less engagement. After getting a Community Note, on average, reposts dropped 46% and likes dropped 44%.
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.
The goals of those developing AI systems for the climate and those working on the front lines of climate advocacy don鈥檛 necessarily align. To compare the two groups, UW researchers interviewed nine people who are developing AI for sustainability and 10 climate advocates.
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.
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.
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.
A new era of astronomy and astrophysics began Monday when the first images captured by the NSF鈥揇OE Vera C. Rubin Observatory were released, demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of the new telescope and the world鈥檚 largest digital camera.
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.
A UW-led team has developed a system, called ProxiCycle, that logs when a passing car comes too close to a cyclist (four feet or less). A small, inexpensive sensor plugs into bicycle handlebars and tracks the passes, sending them to the rider鈥檚 phone. The team tested the system for two months with 15 cyclists in Seattle and found a significant correlation between the locations of close passes and other indicators of poor safety, such as collisions.