UW professor gets MacArthur honor for work with nuanced, ethical AI
A University of Washington professor has been named one of this year's 25 MacArthur Fellows.
Yejin Choi uses natural language processing, not logic or probability, to develop artificial intelligence that has the ability to reason and understand implied meanings. It has broad potential of applying ethics to technology.
Earlier this year, Choi told KUOW's Soundside about one of her projects called "Ask Delphi." It's a prototype designed to make AI more ethically informed.
"The Delphi is a system where you can ask simple questions in natural language and the model will do its best to guess about what the correct answer might be," Choi said.
Delphi weighs in on whether the situation is OK when presented with a moral dilemma.
The MacArthur award, also known as the "genius grant," comes with an $800,000 stipend, no strings attached.
“When I received the phone call from the Foundation, I thought they were going to ask me to do some consulting work,” Choi said in a statement. “My heart almost stopped beating when I heard ‘congratulations’ instead. This is such a great honor because there have been only two other researchers in the natural language processing field who have received this award.”
RELATED: Algorithms constantly make hard decisions online. Can they ever be truly ethical?
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John O'Brien
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John O’Brien is a KUOW newsroom producer. He works with the Morning Edition and All Things Considered teams to schedule, record, and edit interviews and stories on a variety of topics, from politics and public health to arts and culture. He learned to make radio in 2006 as an intern on KUOW’s The Conversation and is a former host of KUOW's Speakers Forum.
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