Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

10/09/2026

Engineering breakthroughs rarely happen in isolation. They depend on open exchange across institutions, disciplines, and borders.

That idea ran through our conversation this week with the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Stanford HAI Founding Director Fei-Fei Li, a QEPrize Laureate, and Former Stanford University President John Hennessy, a QEPrize Trustee, joined Lord Vallance of Balham, Chair of the QEPrize Trustee Board, to discuss what it takes to sustain progress in the age of AI.

Thank you to the QEPrize delegation for spending the day with us at Stanford.

10/07/2026

The AI for social good ecosystem is growing fast: Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into partnerships between frontier labs and nonprofits to deploy AI for global health, climate, and humanitarian outcomes. But what do these partnerships actually deliver, and for whom?

Our latest report — authored by Vera Lummis, Angela Aristidou, and Rob Reich — draws on 36 interviews across 24 organizations and four in-depth case studies to examine how these partnerships form, what drives their success, and where they fall short. It offers concrete recommendations for labs, nonprofits, funders, and intermediaries on how to make these partnerships work for more than a select few.

Read more: https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/beyond-pilots-and-pr-what-makes-ai-for-good-partnerships-work

10/06/2026

Stanford HAI and the AI for Public Benefit Lab are hiring a postdoctoral fellow to study how AI can make a measurable difference in people's lives, across democracy, social services, emotional well-being, and persuasion. The role spans research design, evaluating AI systems for accuracy and neutrality, large-scale field and survey experiments, and collaboration with civic partners, with room to pursue independent work.

Learn more and apply:
https://postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/opportunities/open-postdoctoral-position-faculty-mentor-robb-willer

10/02/2026

Who shapes AI, and how do you keep people at the center of its development?

Stanford HAI Denning Director James Landay spoke with John Werner of Imagination in Action about that question, from educating lawmakers to working with industry while preserving academic independence.

They also discuss how Stanford is adopting AI, the competition for research talent, what the AI Index reveals beyond the headlines, and how safety, sovereignty, and open source connect.

Watch here:

John Werner interviews James Landay, Denning Director of Stanford H...

10/02/2026

What does responsible AI regulation look like in practice?

In a new report, Stanford HAI Associate Director Rob Reich and UC Berkeley School of Information’s Deirdre Mulligan offer the California Department of Technology concrete recommendations for updating the Transparency in Frontier AI Act, from redefining "frontier models" to expanding incident reporting requirements.

Read the report:

In this paper, HAI Associate Director and Senior Fellow Rob Reich and UC Berkeley School of Information Professor Deirdre K. Mulligan provide concrete recommendations to the California Department of Technology on the implementation of its frontier AI transparency requirements.

10/02/2026

In 2018, Stanford experts said driverless cars were 90 percent of the way there. The remaining 10 percent proved stubborn: seeing through fog and rain, reading road markings of varying styles and quality, and making safe decisions.

AI has since helped move self-driving cars onto city streets. But some of the hardest problems remain, including how to prepare vehicles for situations no one can fully anticipate.

"As we try to design for more and rarer situations, it becomes increasingly expensive and harder for human designers to conceptualize those," says Stanford HAI Faculty Affiliate Marco Pavone, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and director of Stanford's Autonomous Systems Laboratory.

In a conversation with Stanford Report, Pavone explains what got autonomous vehicles this far and what could help them go further.

Read more in Stanford Report:

Driverless cars are no longer science fiction. A Stanford expert explains how we got here, while a look back traces the Stanford research that helped pave the way.

10/01/2026

It was wonderful to see so many Stanford HAI faculty and leaders take part in Imagination in Action this month at the Google Bay View campus. We heard so many important conversations and research updates in AI, from scientific discovery and robotics to governance and the future of work.

HAI Leaders and Affiliated Faculty at Imagination in Action: James Landay, Erik Brynjolfsson, Rob Reich, Vanessa Parli, Marco Pavone, Diyi Yang, Surya Ganguli, Melissa Valentine, Arvind Karunakaran, Mehran Sahami.

09/30/2026

Empirical Methods in the Age of AI Conference is sold out. If you were hoping to hear from Anastasios Angelopoulos, there's still a way.

This Friday, the co-founder and CEO of Arena will present at a free Stanford HAI Seminar on measuring AI in the real world. His work sits at the intersection of theoretical statistics and machine learning, with a focus on model evaluation and reliability guarantees for AI systems whose inner workings can't be directly inspected.

Friday, October 2 | 1:00–2:15 PM PT | Gates Computer Science Building, Room 119 or virtually via Zoom

Register here: https://hai.stanford.edu/events/anastasios-angelopoulos-measuring-ai-in-the-real-world

09/28/2026

Policymakers, governments, and business leaders around the world rely on Stanford HAI’s AI Index for rigorous, objective insights into AI’s technical progress, economic influence, and societal impact.

The 2026 AI Index report is now available in Simplified Chinese:
https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai-ai-index-2026-chinese-version-082226.pdf

09/28/2026

📄New Publication: As a new academic year begins, the Hoover Institution and Stanford HAI’s 2026 US Talent Report measures America’s domestic and international STEM pipelines together for the first time, from K-12 classrooms through graduate training, employment, and immigration.

Among the findings:

🔹Young Americans are falling behind in math. U.S. scores have declined on every major assessment since the mid-2010s. American 15-year-olds now rank 34th in the world — and the decline began before the pandemic.
🔹International students earn 51.3% of STEM master’s degrees and 38.7% of research doctorates. In computer science, they earned 64.9% of master’s degrees in 2025. Remove them, and American graduate output in AI, semiconductors, and cryptography falls by more than half.
🔹44.2% of Forbes AI 50 companies had at least one immigrant founder. Every firm worth $100 billion or more had one.

Read the full report:

This report assesses America's ability to develop, attract, and retain STEM talent and warns that its advantages over China are narrowing rapidly.