The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) announced that CHAI PI Stuart Russell is the winner of the 2019 Feigenbaum Prize, and was awarded at the AAAI conference in Honolulu in January “in recognition of (his) high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through innovation and achievement in probabilistic knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning, including its application to global seismic monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.” The Feigenbaum Prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding Artificial Intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science.

CHAI Assistant Director Rosie Campbell gave a talk at the San Francisco AI Meetup to explain in basic terms what a neuron is, how they combine to form a network, why convolutional neural networks have had so much attention, and the challenges and opportunities of AI progress. See the slides here and a write-up of an earlier version of the talk here. Rosie also sat down for a chat with tech blogger Mia Dand on “Keeping AI Safe and Beneficial for Humanity”. Their discussion covered topics such as CHAI’s mission and approach, the problem of AI alignment, and why you might or might not believe AI safety research is important.

“Interning at CHAI has been one of those rare experiences that makes you question beliefs you didn’t realize were there to be questioned… I’m coming away with a very different view on what kind of research is valuable and where the field of safety research currently stands” – Matthew Rahtz

CHAI grad student Rohin Shah was featured on the Future of Humanity Institute’s AI Alignment Podcast where he talked about Inverse Reinforcement Learning and the futuer of value alignment. The podcast can be accessed here.

Joe Halpern gave a talk at the Societal Concerns in Algorithms and Data Analysis conference, over mathematical models of causality. The slides can be found here

Stuart Russell was interviewed by Lex Fridman, a research scientist at MIT who focuses on human-centered AI. The long-form interview goes into great detail on general intelligence, progress in AI, current and future AI risks, and much more.

CHAI graduate students Rohin Shah, Adam Gleave, Daniel Filan, and Dylan Hadfield-Menell, along with interns Matthew Rahtz and Aaron Tucker, attended the NeurIPS 2018 Conference, where they presented papers, met with researchers, and learned about work in the rest of the field.

Professor Michael Wellman has given a series of talks on the ethics of autonomous trading agents.