A writer and military historian responds to Justina Ireland's "Collateral Damage." The histories of the military and technology often go hand in hand. Soldiers and military thinkers throughout the past have continually come up with new ways to fill the people over there full of holes as a means to encourage them to stop trying to do the same to their opponents. After the introduction of a new weapon or the improvement of an existing one, strategists spend their time trying to come up with the best way to deploy their forces to take advantage of the tools and/or to blunt their effectiveness by devising countermeasures. The development of the Greek phalanx helped protect soldiers from cavalry, the deployment of English longbows helped stymie large formations of enemy soldiers, new construction methods changed the shape of fortifications, line infantry helped European formations take advantage of firearms, and anti-aircraft cannons helped protect against incoming enemy aircraft.

In Moshe Vardi's September 2020 column, "Where Have All the Domestic Graduate Students Gone?," the short but woefully incomplete answer is that the wage premium for a Ph.D. in CS is simply too small to justify foregoing five years of industry-level salary. But why is that the case? Part of the answer may be due to government policy discussed back in 1989, when an NSF document addressed the "problem" of Ph.D. salaries being too high, and suggested as a remedy increasing the pool of international students (https://bit.ly/2IuFZl7). This would swell the labor market, holding down wage growth. "A growing influx of foreign Ph.D.'s into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of Ph.D. salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S." But the domestic students would find that the resulting wage suppression would make Ph.D. study a bad choice: "... a key issue [for the domestic students] is pay. The relatively modest salary premium for acquiring [a] Ph.D. may be too low to attract a number of able potential graduate students ... A number of them will select alternative career paths ... by choosing to acquire a'professional' degree in business or law ... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a Ph.D. may actually be negative."

The theory of computation is one of the crown jewels of the computer science curriculum. It stretches from the discovery of mathematical problems, such as the halting problem, that cannot be solved by computers, to the most celebrated open problem in computer science today: the P vs. NP question. Since the founding of our discipline by Church and Turing in the 1930s, the theory of computation has addressed some of the most fundamental questions about computers: What does it mean to compute the solution to a problem? Which problems can be solved by computers? Which problems can be solved efficiently, in theory and in practice?

Amazon has begun rolling out a "new worker safety wearable" to over 25 of its locations over the past year, TechCrunch reported on Friday--namely, a "Robotic Tech Vest" that alerts robots to the location of workers within a facility in order to prevent workplace accidents. The vest in question has built-in sensors that allow Amazon robots to detect obstacles (in this case, humans) and manoeuvre around them. "All of our robotic systems employ multiple safety systems ranging from training materials, to physical barriers to entry, to process controls, to on-board," Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter told TechCrunch. "In the past, associates would mark out the grid of cells where they would be working in order to enable the robotic traffic planner to smartly route around that region. What the vest allows the robots to do is detect the human from farther away and smartly update its travel plan to steer clear without the need for the associate to explicitly mark out those zones."

A wheeled robot named Marty is rolling into nearly 500 grocery stores to alert employees if it encounters spilled granola, squashed tomatoes or a broken jar of mayonnaise. But there could be a human watching from behind its cartoonish googly eyes. Badger Technologies CEO Tim Rowland says its camera-equipped robots stop after detecting a potential spill. But to make sure, humans working in a control center in the Philippines review the imagery before triggering a cleanup message over the loudspeaker. Rowland says 25 of the robots are now operating at certain Giant, Martin's and Stop & Shop stores, with 30 more arriving each week. Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based Giant says it has two robots now working at stores in the state, and plans to expand to all 172 Giant stores by the middle of this year.

A wheeled robot named Marty is rolling into nearly 500 grocery stores to alert employees if it encounters spilled granola, squashed tomatoes or a broken jar of mayonnaise. But there could be a human watching from behind its cartoonish googly eyes. Badger Technologies CEO Tim Rowland says its camera-equipped robots stop after detecting a potential spill. The'Marty' robots will roam grocery store aisles looking for spills and hazards. When it spots an accident, it will alert staff to come and clean up spills.

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Students interested in attending the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Austin, July 30-August 3, 2000, should consult the AAAI web site for further information about the Student Abstract program and the Doctoral Consortium. Details about these programs have also been mailed to all AAAI members. The Scholarship Program provides partial travel support and a complimentary technical program registration for students who (1) are full-time undergraduate or graduate students at colleges and universities; (2) are members of AAAI; (3) submit papers to the technical program or letters of recommendation from their faculty adviser; and (4) submit scholarship applications to AAAI by April 15, 2000. In addition, repeat scholarship applicants must have fulfilled the volunteer and reporting requirements for previous awards. In the event that scholarship applications AAAI President David Waltz presented The 1999 AAAI Classic Paper Award to exceed available funds, preference John McDermott for R1: An Expert in the Computer Systems Domain.