Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash Recent conversations with colleagues brought me, again, to the topic of synthetic data. Their arguments were familiar and, in many cases, reasonable: lack of representative data, privacy constraints, rare events, safety-critical edge cases. Synthetic data promises relief. Yet the more I listened, the
AI
“Those who only know Medicine, don’t even know Medicine". This sentence attributed to Abel Salazar (Portuguese physician, scientist, and artist who became significant for modernizing medical science in Portugal and linking science with humanist culture) this sentence that I found engraved on a wall of University of Porto,
AI
This reflection is prompted by attending the AAAI conference last week, an event that, with 10,000 participants, reached a record size, but the unease it triggered extends well beyond this particular meeting. Perhaps this reads as the perspective of a grumpy old lady. Point taken. But, if so, it
AI
This recent Science article on malicious AI swarms offers a sobering and largely convincing analysis of how agentic AI, when scaled and left unchecked, can threaten democratic discourse and institutions. I agree with most of its diagnosis: the combination of large language models with autonomous agents creates a powerful new
AI
Image by Istvan Brecz-Gruber from Pixabay 2026 is only a couple of weeks in, and AI is forcing concrete political choices. Governments have blocked systems like Grok over real-world harm [1], while energy and housing policies are being reshaped to accommodate power-hungry data centres, making clear that
On my upcoming book "The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future". Princeton University Press, to appear Feb 17, 2026 I have been working in artificial intelligence since the late 1980s, long before AI became something people used daily or feared in headlines. Over the
Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Artificial intelligence does not transform society on its own. What truly shapes the future are human choices: the data we collect and value, the goals we set, the economic incentives we accept
(c) João Maia Pinto & Público (First published in Portuguese in Público on 28 December 2025) As this year draws to a close, it is hard to ignore the profound impact that artificial intelligence has had on public debate, economic strategies, geopolitical manoeuvring, and everyday practices. To grasp the speed
AI
(published in the Guardian on 6 January 2026) The concerns expressed in this article in The Guardian, that advanced AI systems might one day resist being shut down deserves careful consideration, but treating such behaviour as evidence of consciousness is dangerous: it encourages anthropomorphism and distracts from the human design
AI
AI does not need “Mothers”. It needs maturity (first published in LinkedIn on 31 October 2025)In recent months, we’ve seen a troubling pattern in how AI’s leading voices and institutions frame ethics, gender, and governance. Rather than confronting the political, economic, and social conditions that make AI
world
(first published in LinkedIn in December 2025) Being European, for me, has never been confined to the place where I was born. Portugal gave me my roots, the Netherlands shaped my adulthood, and more recently Sweden entrusted me with the task of supporting strengthening its AI research landscape. My identity
computing
(first published in LinkedIn on 15 December 2025) Computing Science is commonly seen as a fundamental scientific discipline focused on the theory and practice of computing, defined around programming, computational systems, and communication, and is grounded in mathematical and engineering principles. As a field, it spans both core and applied