Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few questions.

IT lawyer Eduard Fosch Villaronga wants to promote diversity and inclusiveness in AI research. And that's really important, because he has observed how artificial intelligence - from Twitter to walking robots - is prejudice in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation.

SAILS is a universitywide initiative aimed at facilitating collaboration across disciplines on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Ever heard of conversational artificial intelligence (AI)? Anyone who has ever interacted with Siri or Alexa is familiar with this technology. We use conversational AI every day these days and it is becoming increasingly important in service and sales. A consortium of Dutch scientists and companies is receiving 4.6 million euros from NWO to develop Dutch chatbot technology that can be efficiently adapted for specific topics and companies.

Apps that can precisely identify shards, coins or heel bones: archaeology has embraced artificial intelligence. Alex Brandsen is working on a search engine that scans vast quantities of text from an archaeological viewpoint.

Attachés from the Innovation Attaché Network (IAN) visited Leiden University to meet with researchers working on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and to become more familiar with what Leiden, Leiden University and the LUMC have to offer to possible partners abroad.

Serge Rombouts is a physicist whose PhD thesis was about functional MRI (fMRI). This visualises activity in regions of the brain. The appealing images of glowing brain regions that emerge from the computer are the result of calculations. According to Rombouts, this isn’t proper artificial intelligence. ‘We’ll only have that when the computer can issue advice or make a decision.’ That is precisely what Rombouts wants to achieve. He works with partners including Erasmus Medical Center, which, like Leiden, is part of Medical Delta.

Developing a digital guest lecture for high school students. Jan Sleutels was immediately enthusiastic when he got asked to do this. The end result? Together with his colleague Maarten Lamers, he created the guest lecture 'Thinking about Artificial Intelligence'.

It is a familiar phenomenon: you ask the assistant on your phone to call your mother, but it calls a friend instead. Tom Kouwenhoven, PhD student in the SAILS programme, investigates how humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can better communicate with each other, so that these kinds of situations will no longer occur in the future.

Friso Selten recently started a PhD position that is part of the SAILS program. This PhD project is a collaboration between FGGA, LIACS, and eLaw, and is supervised by Bram Klievink (FGGA), Joost Broekens (LIACS), and Francien Deschene (eLaw). In the project Friso will investigate the influence of artificial intelligence within public organizations with a specific focus on decision-making processes. ‘I became particularly enthusiastic about the topic of AI and its application in the public sector while studying for a Master's degree in Data Science at the University of Amsterdam. This inspired me to follow the research master's in Public Administration and Organisational Science at Utrecht University. In this program, I primarily focused on the impact that algorithms have within the street-level bureaucracy. I hope to further investigate these and other aspects of the connection between AI, public administration, and ethics in this PhD project.’