Akari Asai is a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and an incoming Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her research advances reliable and up-to-date language systems, especially retrieval-augmented and agentic language models, and applies them to high-impact settings, including scientific discovery and information access for underrepresented languages. Akari's work has been published at top-tier NLP and ML venues and in Nature, and has been recognized with multiple paper awards, the IBM Global Fellowship, and industry grants. She is a recipient of the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award, was named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 and Forbes 30 Under 30 (Asia, Science), and has been featured by outlets including Forbes and MIT Technology Review.
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2025 marked a pivotal shift in AI - from testing to deployment. This happened as generative and agentic systems became essential in key sectors worldwide. This feature highlights the major AI ethics and policy developments of 2025, and concludes with a forward-looking perspective on the ethical and policy challenges likely to shape 2026.
Aishwarya Agrawal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal. She is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a core academic member of Mila -- Quebec AI Institute, and spends one day a week as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Aishwarya's research focus is on Multimodal AI research, specifically Vision-Language research. Aishwarya is a recipient of the 2025 Mark Everingham Prize, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award, a Young Alumni Excellence Award from IIT Gandhinagar, a Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, a Georgia Tech College of Computing Dissertation Award, a Google Fellowship (declined), a Facebook Fellowship (declined) and an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship.
