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If you have trouble figuring out if an image of a person is real or if it’s been generated using artificial intelligence, you’re not alone.

A new study conducted by Cheriton School of Computer Science researchers found that people had more difficulty than expected distinguishing who is a real person and who is artificially generated.

The study saw 260 participants provided with 20 unlabeled pictures: 10 of which were of real people obtained from Google searches, and the other 10 generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, two commonly used AI programs that generate images.

Edith Law is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where she co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Her research delves into social computing technology, machine intelligence interactions, and the design and user experience of technology that upholds important human values.

Professor Law explains how we can harness the power of new technologies ethically for the betterment of humanity.

Opinion by Professor Law

Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, an estimated 230,000 people are diagnosed with the disease every year.  

University Professor Ming Li, the Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics, is using deep learning technology to make personalized cancer vaccines accessible to everyone. He began doing cancer research when his wife, Jessie W. H. Zou, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she died in 2010, her legacy continues in his research. 

Researchers have created a new AI-assisted digital art tool designed to help art therapy patients better express themselves while maintaining the efficacy of the process.

The tool, dubbed DeepThInk, was designed by researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Southern University of Science and Technology in collaboration with art therapists. DeepThInk grew out of the challenges the therapists faced when the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to conduct their work virtually.

Professor Shlomi Steinberg has a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. While pursuing his doctoral degree he was a recipient of an NVIDIA PhD fellowship. He received his MSc in mathematics and computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel under the supervision of Professor David Harel. His master’s research centred on efficient execution and distribution of formally verifiable software paradigms.

Professors Shai Ben-David and Ian Goldberg have been named 2023 ACM Fellows. The Association for Computing Machinery is recognizing Professor Ben-David for his contributions to and research leadership in machine learning theory, and Professor Goldberg for his contributions to the development and deployment of privacy enhancing technologies.

University Professor Ming Li is the 2024 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award, a prestigious honour conferred for his pioneering and enduring contributions to modern information theory and bioinformatics.

Four students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science are recipients of the Computing Research Association’s 2024 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. The annual CRA awards program recognizes students from universities across North America who have distinguished themselves by conducting exceptional computer science research as undergrads.

This year, Matthew Yang was a finalist, and Ruidi Wei, Jiawen Zhu and Alex Zhuang each received honourable mentions for their research.

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Professor Daniel Vogel a Distinguished Member for his fundamental contributions to human-computer interaction and applications of novel forms of interaction. He is among 52 individuals recognized internationally by ACM for their outstanding scientific contributions to computing.

Extremophiles are species that are adapted to live at the edges of biological tolerance, in a range of environments that seem inhospitable to life by human standards. These extremely hardy organisms are found in all three domains and all six kingdoms of life, the highest and second highest levels of classification biologists use to categorize living things based on common ancestry.