The development of smart cars, video games that adapt to your gaming behaviour, law enforcement assigning your neighbourhood a risk score, insurance rates determined by your behaviour, finding your perfect match via an app: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly and radically transforming our interactions and the basic structure of our society. Our new minor AI and Society provides you with a basic understanding of AI and its applications in the world of today and tomorrow.

You can do a degree in Artificial Intelligence at Leiden University, but its role is also increasing in other degree programmes.

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'.

Government and public bodies in the Netherlands increasingly make use of complex data that has been collected on citizens. But the connections between all this data are nontransparent and the algorithms government services use to process the data are difficult to verify. This is a recipe for persistent system errors that can have major consequences as was seen in the recent childcare benefits scandal. The Dutch House of Representatives has now passed a new law that allows data connections that go even further.

On October 14, the first symposium of the university-wide initiative SAILS took place. Scientists from Leiden University and other Dutch universities came together to share their enthusiasm and expertise in the field of Artificial Intelligence in a festive symposium, in the atmospheric Museum of Ethnology.

At Leiden University, researchers from all disciplines work together to find answers and design innovations in the field of artificial intelligence.

Intelligent machines are going to make ethical decisions too. Should a self-driving car be allowed to slam into pedestrians to save its passengers from a head-on collision? Should a negotiation app be able to detect stress in your opponent’s voice? And who makes these decisions: the user, the system’s designer or the law?