How AI support can go wrong in safety-critical settings
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 19-Aug-2025 00:10 ET (19-Aug-2025 04:10 GMT/UTC)
When it comes to adopting artificial intelligence in high-stakes settings like hospitals and airplanes, good AI performance and a brief worker training on the technology is not sufficient to ensure systems will run smoothly and patients and passengers will be safe, a new study suggests. Instead, algorithms and the people who use them in the most safety-critical organizations must be evaluated simultaneously to get an accurate view of AI’s effects on human decision making, researchers say. The team also contends these evaluations should assess how people respond to good, mediocre and poor technology performance to put the AI-human interaction to a meaningful test – and to expose the level of risk linked to mistakes.
A group of UBC Okanagan students has helped create technology that could improve how doctors and scientists detect everything from tumours to wildfires.
Working under the guidance of Associate Professor Xiaoping Shi from UBCO’s Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, the students designed and tested a system called an adaptive multiple change point energy-based model segmentation (MEBS).
Media Invitation – IJCAI 2025, Montréal, Canada
Artificial Intelligence for a Better World – Since 1969
The 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) takes place August 16–22, 2025 in Montréal, Canada, bringing together over 2,000 AI researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders. Guided by the theme “AI at the service of society”, IJCAI 2025 features world-class keynote speakers, award-winning researchers, thematic tracks on AI for Social Good, Human-Centred AI, and AI, Arts & Creativity, as well as admission free public events like the AI Lounge: Between Wonder and Caution.
Highlights include talks by Yoshua Bengio, Heng Ji, Luc De Raedt, Bernhard Schölkopf, and IJCAI 2025 awardees Aditya Grover, Rina Dechter, and Cynthia Rudin. The program also showcases AI-driven competitions, an AI Art Gallery, and discussions on ethics, creativity, and global impact.
Full program & details: https://2025.ijcai.org
Media contact: mrozman@ijcai.org
Scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, working in collaboration with a team from the University of Texas at El Paso, have developed a novel computational framework for understanding how a region of the brain known as the striatum is involved in the everyday decisions we make and, importantly, how it might factor into impaired decision-making by individuals with psychiatric disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder.
A new systematic review and meta-analysis published in eGastroenterology reveals that eradication of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) may increase the risk of reflux oesophagitis (RE) occurrence or recurrence. By analyzing data from 30 prospective cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, the study found a significantly higher RE risk in patients receiving H. pylori eradication therapy, especially with longer follow-up periods. Although geographic region, age, and baseline disease modified the effect, the trend was generally consistent. Clinicians are advised to consider individual patient profiles before initiating eradication therapy. These findings challenge existing assumptions about the uniformly beneficial role of H. pylori eradication.