Related papers: Agencies and Science-Experiment Risk
Despite years of research, understanding of the space radiation environment and the risk it poses to long-duration astronauts remains limited. There is a disparity between research results and observed empirical effects seen in human…
Artificial Intelligence represents many things: a new market to conquer or a quality label for tech companies, a threat for traditional industries, a menace for democracy, or a blessing for our busy everyday life. The press abounds in…
LLM-based agents are rapidly being adopted for scientific data analysis, automating tasks once limited by human time and expertise. This capability is often framed as an acceleration of discovery, but it also accelerates a familiar failure…
Risk thresholds provide a measure of the level of risk exposure that a society or individual is willing to withstand, ultimately shaping how we determine the safety of technological systems. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the first…
HRI researchers have made major strides in developing robotic architectures that are capable of reading a limited set of social cues and producing behaviors that enhance their likeability and feeling of comfort amongst humans. However, the…
I examine threat modeling techniques and questions of power dynamics in the systems in which they're used. I compare techniques that can be used by system creators to those used by those who are not involved in creating the system. That…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology's transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show…
The potential for advances in information-age technologies to undermine nuclear deterrence and influence the potential for nuclear escalation represents a critical question for international politics. One challenge is that uncertainty about…
National research evaluation exercises provide a comparative measure of research performance of the nation's institutions, and as such represent a tool for stimulating research productivity, particularly if the results are used to inform…
Recent proposals aiming at regulating artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) suggest a particular form of risk regulation, i.e. a risk-based approach. The most salient example is the Artificial Intelligence Act…
This paper critically evaluates the European Commission's proposed AI Act's approach to risk management and risk acceptability for high-risk AI systems that pose risks to fundamental rights and safety. The Act aims to promote "trustworthy"…
Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these data-driven policies, especially in the realm of public policy, are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and…
Contamination of signals by pickup and interference is a recurrent problem in physics experiments, the suppression of which consumes much time and effort. Techniques are presented which allow the time-domain assessment of mitigation…
Autonomous agents acting in the real-world often operate based on models that ignore certain aspects of the environment. The incompleteness of any given model -- handcrafted or machine acquired -- is inevitable due to practical limitations…
Technology companies are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as part of their development process. Despite having fine control over engineering systems and data instrumentation, these RCTs can still be imperfectly…
Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…
Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to…
The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…
Decision problems in physics have been an active field of research for quite a few decades resulting in some interesting findings in recent years. However, such research investigations are based on a priori knowledge of theoretical computer…
Regulatory frameworks are a common tool in governance to incent and coerce behaviors supporting national or strategic stability. This includes domestic regulations and international agreements. Though regulation is always a challenge, the…