Artificial Intelligence Archives

March 8, 2025April 19, 2025

About Inclusive AI

The Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon is the largest economics encyclopedia in the German-speaking world. In March 2025, Oliver Bendel published an article on inclusive AI in this reference work. The first part reads as follows: “Inclusive AI aims, on the one hand, to combat phenomena in artificial intelligence (AI) that have an exclusionary character – such as bias, hallucination, hate speech, and deepfakes – and, on the other hand, to strengthen applications with an inclusionary character in order to support those affected. One meaning is associated with terms like “responsible AI”, “explainable AI”, and “trustworthy AI”, while the other aligns with concepts such as “AI for good” or “AI for wellbeing”. Overall, this falls under the umbrella of “ethical AI”, though this term is also used in marketing contexts. In 2025, the World Economic Forum (WEF) pointed to the digital divide, asking: “How do we ensure that the growth of AI doesn’t leave people behind and is truly inclusive?” Inclusive AI can be associated with generative AI as well as with other forms of artificial intelligence.” The full article is available at:
wirtschaftslexikon.gabler.de/definition/inclusive-ai-171870.

February 27, 2025March 21, 2025

The VISUAL Project

The VISUAL project will be launched in March 2025 at the FHNW School of Business. It was initiated by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel. VISUAL stands for “Virtual Inclusive Safaris for Unique Adventures and Learning”. There are webcams all over the world showing wild animals. Sighted people can use them to go on photo safaris from the comfort of their sofa. Blind and visually impaired people are at a disadvantage. As part of inclusive AI – a movement that includes apps like Be My Eyes with the Be My AI feature – a solution is to be found for them. The project aims to develop a prototype by August 2025 that will allow blind and visually impaired people to have webcam images of wildlife described to them. The system takes regular snapshots of the videos and analyzes and evaluates them using a multimodal LLM. It presents the results ini spoken language via an integrated text-to-speech engine. As a byproduct, poaching, bush and forest fires, and other events can be detected. The project is likely to be one of the first to combine inclusive AI with new approaches of animal-computer interaction (ACI).

February 1, 2025February 1, 2025

A Video About the ICSR 2023

ICSR is one of the leading conferences for social robotics worldwide. The 17th edition will take place from 10 to 12 September 2025 in Naples, Italy. Participants will meet for two days at the Parthenope University of Naples and for the third day at the Città della Scienza conference center. In 2023, the conference took place in Doha, Qatar. A video on YouTube by Hooman Samani provides insights into the presentations and events: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtgM8pTPw8c … It not only shows that numerous top-class presentations take place, but also that the members of the community are highly motivated and have a lot of fun. The high level of internationality and diversity of the conference should also be emphasized. The conference website of ICSR 2025 is online since January: icsr2025.eu.

November 28, 2024November 28, 2024

Human Stuff from AI Characters

“Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive – they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion.” (MIT Technology Review, 27 November 2024) This was reported by MIT Technology Review in an article on November 27. “The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs) to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators.” (MIT Technology Review, 27 November 2024) According to the magazine, the work by AI startup Altera is part of a broader field that seeks to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions. The article entitled “These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own” can be accessed here.

August 28, 2024August 29, 2024

Continuation of the AAAI Spring Symposia

On 27 August 2024, AAAI announced the continuation of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series, to be held March 31 – April 2, 2025, at San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront in Burlingame, CA. The Call for Proposals for the Spring Symposium Series is available on the Spring Symposium Series website. According to the organizers, proposals are due October 4, 2024, and early submissions are encouraged. “The Spring Symposium Series is an annual set of meetings run in parallel at a common site. It is designed to bring colleagues together in an intimate forum while at the same time providing a significant gathering point for the AI community.” (Website AAAI) The traditional conference will therefore not be held at Stanford University in 2025 – as it was in 2023. It returned there in 2024 to the delight of all participants. The Covid-19 pandemic had hit the conference hard before. The AAAI can only be advised to return to Stanford in 2026. Only there will the conference live up to its promise.

July 18, 2024July 18, 2024

Tinder’s AI Photo Selector

Tinder has officially launched its “Photo Selector” feature, which uses AI to help users choose the best photos for their dating profiles. This was reported by TechCrunch in the article “Tinder’s AI Photo Selector automatically picks the best photos for your dating profile” by Lauren Forristal. The feature, now available to all users in the U.S. and set to roll out internationally later this summer, leverages facial detection technology. Users upload a selfie, and the AI creates a unique facial geometry to identify their face and select photos from their camera roll. The feature curates a collection of 10 selfies it believes will perform well based on Tinder’s insights on good profile images, focusing on aspects like lighting and composition. Tinder’s AI is trained on a diverse dataset to ensure inclusivity and accuracy, aligning with the company’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) standards. It also filters out photos that violate guidelines, such as nudes. The goal is to save users time and reduce uncertainty when choosing profile pictures. A recent Tinder survey revealed that 68% of participants found an AI photo selection feature helpful, and 52% had trouble selecting profile images. The TechCrunch article was published on 17 July 2024 and is available at techcrunch.com/2024/07/17/tinder-ai-photo-selection-feature-launches/.

May 4, 2024May 9, 2024

Irish Girl Can Speak and Write Irish

Conversational agents have been the subject of Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel’s research for a quarter of a century. He dedicated his doctoral thesis at the University of St. Gallen from the end of 1999 to the end of 2022 to them – or more precisely to pedagogical agents, which would probably be called virtual learning companions today. He has been a professor at the FHNW School of Business since 2009. From 2012, he mainly developed chatbots and voice assistants in the context of machine ethics, including GOODBOT, LIEBOT, BESTBOT, and SPACE THEA. In 2022, the information systems specialist and philosopher of technology then turned his attention to dead and endangered languages. Under his supervision, Karim N’diaye developed the chatbot @ve for Latin and Dalil Jabou the chatbot @llegra for Vallader, an idiom of Rhaeto-Romanic, enhanced with voice output. He is currently testing the range of GPTs – “customized versions of ChatGPT”, as OpenAI calls them – for endangered languages such as Irish (Irish Gaelic), Maori, and Basque. According to ChatGPT, there is a relatively large amount of training material for them. A first version of Irish Girl was created on May 3, 2024. At first glance, she seems to have a good grasp of the Goidelic language from the Celtic family. You can have the answers translated into English or German. Afterwards, you may have to ask her to switch back to Irish. Irish Girl is available in the GPT Store and will be further improved in the coming weeks.

April 2, 2024April 9, 2024

The AAAI Spring Symposia are Back Again

On the second day of the AAAI Spring Symposia, one could already get the impression that the traditional conference has returned to its former greatness. The Covid pandemic had damaged it. In 2023, there were still too few participants for some symposia. Many stayed home and watched the sessions online. It was difficult for everyone involved. But the problems had already started in 2019. At that time, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence had decided not to publish the proceedings centrally any more, but to leave it to the individual organizers. Some of them were negligent or disinterested and left the scientists alone with their demands. In 2024, the association took over the publication process again, which led to very positive reactions in the community. Last but not least, of course, the boost from generative AI helped. In 2024, you can see many happy and exuberant AI experts at Stanford University, with mild temperatures and lots of sunshine.