The AAAI 2023 best paper awards were presented at the conference on Saturday 11 February. The awards comprised one outstanding paper, one outstanding student paper, and 12 distinguished papers. The AAAI outstanding paper award is given to a paper (or papers) that "exemplifies the highest standards in technical contribution and exposition". Abstract: The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function R from a policy pi. To do this, we need a model of how pi relates to R. In the current literature, the most common models are optimality, Boltzmann rationality, and causal entropy maximisation.

Feeld Notes is a column about a middle-aged woman who suddenly realizes she wants to have sex again--and the beguiling app she uses to do it. Not to imply I get liked by a lot of men--ha!--but of the men who do like my profile, a significant percentage of them are substantially younger than I am. Listen, I'm not a cougar, an appellation that, by definition, suggests a certain predatory instinct. As I've explained previously, I don't have it in me. But I'd be lying if I said that that some part of me isn't delighted to think that the pictures and the words on my profile project a sort of youthful exuberance.

It's great to see you on a Saturday. As you've likely seen, artificial intelligence has been the talk of the town. Nothing's been hotter than ChatGPT -- the bot's garnered 1 billion cumulative web hits since November, and users have used it to write articles, emails, and even dating-app messages. I caught up with Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary to get his thoughts on the burgeoning tech trend and how he plans to play the market in 2023. If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Kevin O'Leary is the chairman of O'Leary Ventures, a media personality, and veteran investor.

Two years ago, Microsoft president Brad Smith told a US congressional hearing that tech companies like his own had not been sufficiently paying media companies for the news content that helps fuel search engines like Bing and Google. "What we're talking about here is far bigger than us," he said, testifying alongside news executives. "Let's hope that, if a century from now people are not using iPhones or laptops or anything that we have today, journalism itself is still alive and well. Because our democracy depends on it." Smith said tech companies should do more and that Microsoft was committed to continuing "healthy revenue-sharing" with news publishers, including licensing articles for Microsoft news apps.

Data scientist Sahar Nasiri originally went to college to study industrial engineering. After taking Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on a professor's recommendation, however, she knew she wanted her future to be in AI. Now she uses AI to help Delta Airlines keep its planes in top operating condition. She spoke with us about her early interview struggles, how she landed her first job, and the value of truly understanding statistics. Can you tell me about your current role? When did you start, what is your title, and what are your primary responsibilities?

AI can be unsettling for most people. Off the top of their head, many people think about robots taking over the human population or self-destructive devices. When coupled with construction, an industry that is notable for being slow to embrace technology; then you have reached a standstill as said industry is reluctant to change. On one corner is AI; a bit of an unknown element but one that is also dynamic and capable of many things. On the other, there is the construction sector; a dwindling industry frequently faced with challenges that threaten workers' safety, productivity, and resources.

Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can not only engage in human-like conversation, but also provide accurate answers to questions in a wide range of knowledge domains. The chatbot, created by the firm OpenAI, is based on a family of "large language models" -- algorithms that can recognize, predict, and generate text based on patterns they identify in datasets containing hundreds of millions of words. In a study appearing in PLOS Digital Health this week, researchers report that ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) -- a comprehensive, three-part exam that doctors must pass before practicing medicine in the United States. In an editorial accompanying the paper, Leo Anthony Celi, a principal research scientist at MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, a practicing physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and his co-authors argue that ChatGPT's success on this exam should be a wake-up call for the medical community. Q: What do you think the success of ChatGPT on the USMLE reveals about the nature of the medical education and evaluation of students?

A number of prestigious awards were announced shortly before the start of AAAI 2023, and will be officially presented during the conference. Some of the winners will also be giving invited talks as part of the programme. The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity recognises the positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The winner of this year's award is Tuomas Sandholm (Carnegie Mellon University). Tuomas has been recognised for "outstanding scientific and software contributions to the design and implementation of organ exchanges, and their direct impact on both practice and policy".

There are many advantages of grasping how an AI-enabled system has arrived at a particular output. Explainability can help developers ensure that their algorithms are working as expected and meeting regulatory standards. It also makes it possible for those affected by an AI decision to challenge or change that outcome. But before we hold AI machines to such high levels of explainability, there is a crucial question: How good are humans in explaining themselves? Riding a bicycle is considered a very simple human action.

Local governments increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) for automated decision-making. Contestability, making systems responsive to dispute, is a way to ensure they respect human rights to autonomy and dignity. We investigate the design of public urban AI systems for contestability through the example of camera cars: human-driven vehicles equipped with image sensors. Applying a provisional framework for contestable AI, we use speculative design to create a concept video of a contestable camera car. Using this concept video, we then conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 civil servants who work with AI employed by a large northwestern European city. The resulting data is analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify the main challenges facing the implementation of contestability in public AI. We describe how civic participation faces issues of representation, public AI systems should integrate with existing democratic practices, and cities must expand capacities for responsible AI development and operation.