Ziwen Wan, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at University of California, Irvine, has studied why driverless cars may be acting this way.  Wan found that ordinary objects on the road can lead to dangerous driving behavior. … “The software can make the autonomous vehicle behave as conservatively as possible because a safety violation would be very serious,” Wan says. “But this may lead to concerns on the other side, like in some cases, even though it’s safe it will fail to drive normally.” That abnormal driving includes abrupt halts, swerves, erratic behavior or just stopping in the middle of the road.

Read the full story on NPR.

Bots are better and faster than humans at online CAPTCHA tests designed to keep them out of websites. The finding calls into question whether we should continue using these kind of security measures, given how much frustration they can cause for people. …

Gene Tsudik at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues have shown that bots have little problem solving the current crop of tests faster than humans, and suggest the tests are more trouble than they are worth.

“We do know for sure that they [the tests] are very much unloved. We didn’t have to do a study to come to that conclusion,” he says. “But people don’t know whether that effort, that colossal global effort that is invested into solving CAPTCHAs every day, every year, every month, whether that effort is actually worthwhile.”

Read the full story on New Scientist (must create free account to view full article).

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science [assistant] professor at University of California, Irvine whose paper “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse” has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about internet resilience when the coronavirus began to spread, and she realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread internet failure was scant. “We’ve never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don’t know how our infrastructure would respond to it,” Jyothi said. “Our failure testing doesn’t even include such scenarios.”

Read the full story on The Washington Post. 

UCI alumni siblings Karishma and Pratyush Muthukumar ’22 to present at UN’s AI for Good 2023 global summit.

Karishma and Pratyush Muthukumar play to each other’s strengths. Over the years, the siblings, UCI alumni, have tag-teamed many projects together, employing their respective expertise in cognitive science and computer science. Their current project: developing an empathetic chatbot for use in the medical field.

“There’s a lot of buzz around ChatGPT and similar language models that are coming out around this time, but we wanted to gear a chatbot specifically designed to consider empathy and compassion in responses,” says Pratyush Muthukumar, the younger of the pair. “Patients suffering from depression, anxiety or other mental health challenges might be able to talk with a chatbot that’s empathetic.”

He and his sister both graduated from UCI in 2022, Pratyush with a degree in computer science and Karishma in cognitive science.

She was invited by the United Nations to be a speaker at the AI for Good global summit in 2020, but it was delayed several years due to the pandemic. When organizers reached out again in 2022, she suggested a joint talk with her brother on their recent research together at UCI. Finally, the two Southern California natives will be making their way to Europe in July for a presentation on emotion-driven AI at the summit, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Read the full story on UCI News.

Sameer Singh, a computer scientist [and associate professor] at the University of California, Irvine worries that focusing on possible futures obscures the very real impacts that AI’s failures or follies are already having. “When I hear of resources going to AGI [artificial general intelligence] and these long-term effects, I feel like it’s taking away from the problems that actually matter,” he says. … “It’s much more exciting to talk about, ‘we’ve reached this science-fiction goal,’ rather than talk about the actual realities of things,” says Singh. “That’s kind of where I am, and I feel like that’s kind of where a lot of the community that I work with is.” 

Read the full story on Popular Science.

Chris Inglis, former National Cyber Director in the White House, sat down for his first interview as a private citizen with David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former assistant attorney general for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and executive director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute. They talked about a wide range of cyber topics, including the newly minted National Cyber Strategy, protection of critical infrastructure, cyber insurance, competition in the international front, and more.

Listen to the podcast: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-chris-inglis

The TWIML AI Podcast, originally launched by Sam Charrington in 2016 as This Week in Machine Learning & AI, is a popular podcast highlighting the “top minds and ideas from the world of ML and AI to a broad and influential community of ML/AI researchers, data scientists, engineers, and tech-savvy business and IT leaders.” On Jan. 23, 2023, Charrington sat down with a faculty member of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) for a podcast titled, “AI Trends 2023: Natural Language Proc — ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Cutting Edge Research with Sameer Singh.”

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