December 2021

AI2 Newsletter

Top story

Delphi: a first step toward machine morality

In November AI2 released an interactive demo of Delphi, an AI model capable of suggesting moral judgments about any situation a user describes (for example, mowing the lawn at 3am). Delphi is an early investigation in the nascent field of machine ethics, a line of research aimed at making the AI systems that interact with humans more ethically informed, socially aware, and culturally inclusive.

Delphi received millions of user inputs in its first few weeks, sparking wide discussion about the promise and the limitations of research into ethical models. Read more about Delphi in The New York Times and get a deeper look into the process and lessons of Delphi on the AI2 Blog.

Protecting cougars in the PNW

Pumas (or cougars, as they're locally known) are a critical indicator of the health of the Olympic peninsula's rainforests. As a key apex predator, tracking their behavior tells conservationists whether or not this important ecosystem is healthy — but keeping an eye on the puma population and following their migration patterns hasn't always been easy. Thankfully, AI2's EarthRanger project has helped the team at Panthera access more tracking data than ever before. Learn more about the incredible work these teams are doing in this broadcast story from CBS Mornings.

Semantic Scholar's API offers new data

Semantic Scholar, the AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, released new API functionality this week. API users can now access the TLDRs (AI-generated single-sentence paper summaries) of over 58 million papers in the fields of computer science and biomedicine, allowing users to more quickly determine the relevancy of a paper in their work. Additionally, three new author fields now accessible in the Semantic Scholar API let users retrieve how many papers a given author has published, and how many total citations those papers have accrued.

Want to learn more about AI2's work or connect with an expert? Reach us at press@allenai.org.

Featured AI2er: 
Bailey Kuehl


Bailey Kuehl is a Data Science Analyst on the Semantic Scholar team, and in this interview, she shares work highlights over the last 15 months and insights into what's to come. Learn what it's like to be a part of this cutting-edge team — and what Bailey's favorite PNW activities are — at the AI2 blog.

Learn more ➞

How NLP can improve vaccine confidence


In this featured article from the pnw.ai hub, two professors at Columbia University aim to demonstrate how AI can reduce misinformation and improve messaging to increase public confidence in COVID-19 vaccinations.

Learn more ➞

More from us

➞ AI2 Incubator spinout WhyLabs raises $10M in Series A
EarthRanger announces their inaugural Conservation Tech Award recipients
Empowering cloud providers and AI practitioners to make greener decisions
Watch talks from EarthRanger's recent user conference in Johannesburg, South Africa
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