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.
Tag: Information School
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.
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.
Eight 黑料老司机 researchers have been selected as Fulbright Scholars for 2026-2027 and will pursue studies around the world.聽 Fulbright Scholars are college and university faculty, administrators and researchers, as well as artists and professionals, who build their skills and connections, gain valuable international insights and return home to share their experiences with their students and colleagues. This year鈥檚 UW cohort represents a variety of disciplines, including sciences, engineering, business, environmental sciences, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science….
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.
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.
The 黑料老司机鈥檚 graduate and professional degree programs again were recognized as among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report鈥檚 2026 Best Graduate Schools released late Monday.
Since Ryan Calo joined 黑料老司机 School of Law in 2012, he has become a leading expert on the law and emerging technology.聽聽
The 黑料老司机 is the best in the U.S. and No. 2 in the world for library and information management, according to the 2026 QS World University Rankings by Subject released Wednesday. Three other UW subject areas placed in the top 10 in the world: geology, geophysics and Earth and marine sciences.
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 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.
UW researchers discuss their study which surveyed 166 gamers about how video games sparked meaningful changes in their lives.
Research by the 黑料老司机 and the USPTO found that some simple interventions increased the probability that female inventors would get patents by 12%. For first-time applicants, that probability increased to 17%.
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%.
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.
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.
The 黑料老司机鈥檚 graduate and professional degree programs were widely recognized as among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report鈥檚 2026 Best Graduate Schools released late Monday.
The 黑料老司机 is the best in the U.S. and No. 2 in the world for library and information management, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject released Wednesday. Four other UW subject areas placed in the top 10.
A UW team studied how AI systems portray teens in English and Nepali, and found that in English language systems around 30% of the responses referenced societal problems such as violence, drug use and mental illness. The Nepali system produced fewer negative associations in responses, closer to 10% of all answers.
Chirag Shah, a UW professor in the Information School, discusses what AI agents are and what might impede a near future where people can simply get AI bots to shop for them.
UW News sat down with experts in public health and AI to discuss AI could enhance health care, what鈥檚 standing in the way, and whether there’s a downside to democratizing medical research.聽聽
黑料老司机 researchers developed a system for detecting subtle biases in AI models. They found seven of the eight popular AI models they tested in conversations around race and caste generated significant amounts of biased text in interactions 鈥� particularly when discussing caste. Open-source models fared far worse than two proprietary ChatGPT models.
黑料老司机 researchers found significant racial, gender and intersectional bias in how three state-of-the-art large language models ranked resumes. The models favored white-associated names 85% of the time, female-associated names only 11% of the time, and never favored Black male-associated names over white male-associated names.
黑料老司机 researchers investigated how iBuyers 鈥� companies that use automated algorithms to quickly buy and sell homes 鈥� have affected the well-documented racial bias against Black home sellers. Looking at Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, they found that on average iBuyers paid more equal prices to Black and white home sellers than individual buyers, largely because iBuyers paid white sellers significantly less on average than an individual buyer. They also discovered that iBuyers were significantly more likely to resell homes to institutions, such as large rental companies that鈥檝e been tied to high eviction rates and rent-gouging.
Three new faculty books from the 黑料老司机 cover the recipes and culture of the world鈥檚 largest Syrian refugee camp, traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples and data science for neuroimaging researchers. UW News spoke with the authors to learn more. Documenting history and rituals of Syrian cuisine When Karen E. Fisher was invited to Zaatari, the world鈥檚 largest Syrian refugee camp, she noticed that stories of the camp rarely included women鈥檚 voices. As she learned more about their…
New research from the 黑料老司机 finds that teens open Instagram because they鈥檙e bored. Then they sift through largely irrelevant content, mostly feeling bored, while seeking interesting bits to share with their friends in direct messages. Then, eventually bored with what researchers call a 鈥渃ontent soup,鈥� they log off.
But in her new book 鈥淟og Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix,鈥� Katherine Cross, a UW doctoral student in the Information School, argues that social media has limited political value.
鈥淲e asked one 11-year-old how he鈥檇 feel if his favorite book series was written by AI instead of an author, and he said it would 鈥榙ismantle鈥� the joy of reading for him. We often don’t think about kids having these deep, existential questions about what it means to be an artist,鈥� said Michele Newman, a 黑料老司机 doctoral student in the Information School.
黑料老司机 researchers created and tested a prototype browser extension called Viblio, which lets viewers and creators add citations to the timelines of YouTube videos.
The 黑料老司机 has been named one of the world鈥檚 top universities, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject released Wednesday.
Sandy Littletree, a UW assistant professor in the Information School, discusses the importance of working Indigenous ways of knowing into libraries, archives and data repositories.
黑料老司机 researchers taught a group of high schoolers to code by combining cultural research into various embroidery traditions with 鈥渃omputational embroidery.鈥� The method teaches kids to encode embroidery patterns on a computer through a coding language called Turtlestitch.
New research from the UW examines how three wellness Instagram influencers profited from anti-vaccine misinformation.
Mike Teodorescu, a 黑料老司机 assistant professor in the Information School, proposes that private enterprise standards for fairer machine learning systems would inform governmental regulation.
黑料老司机 researchers found that when prompted to make pictures of 鈥渁 person,鈥� the AI image generator over-represented light-skinned men, failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples and sexualized images of certain women of color.
This week, attend the UW Pandemic Project’s Radical Listening Session to honor each individual’s lived pandemics experiences, head to Meany Hall for Garrick Ohlsson’s piano performance, celebrate Diwali with the Burke Museum, and more. November 7, 4:30 – 6:00pm | Sharon Stein, “The University and Its Responsibility for Repair: Confronting Colonial Foundations and Enabling Different Futures” | A Worlds of Difference lecture, Communications Building This presentation by Sharon Stein asks how universities can navigate the complexity of confronting the colonial…
A team led by researchers at the 黑料老司机 has created A11yBoard for Google Slides, a browser extension and phone or tablet app that allows blind users to navigate through complex slide layouts, objects, images and text.