Daphne Koller is best known as the cofounder of Coursera, the open database for online learning that launched in 2012. But before her work on Coursera, she was doing something much different. In 2000, Koller started working on applying machine learning to biomedical data sets to understand gene activity across cancer types. She put that work on hold to nurture Coursera, which took many more years than she initially thought it would. She didn't return to biology until 2016 when she joined Alphabet's life science research and development arm Calico.

I am a scientist. I am an American. And I am the product of special expert visas and chain migration—among the many types of legal immigration into the United States. On 22 June, President Trump issued a proclamation that temporarily restricts many types of legal immigration into the country, including that of scientists and students. This will make America neither greater nor safer—rather, it could make America less so. The administration claims that these restrictions are necessitated by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak to prevent threats to American workers. This reasoning is flawed for science and engineering, where immigrants are critical to achieving advances and harnessing the resulting economic opportunity for all Americans. For decades, the United States has inspired both immigrants and nonimmigrants to make substantial contributions to science and technology that benefit everyone. Preventing highly skilled scientists and postdocs from entering the United States directly threatens this enterprise. My uncle, a geologist, came to the United States in the 1960s to work at NASA. He then taught at Appalachian State University in North Carolina and later served as lead geochemist for the state of California. He sponsored my father to come to America in 1968. Leaving Mumbai, a city of millions, and arriving in Hickory, a town of thousands in North Carolina, my father came home to a place he had never been before. My parents worked in furniture factories and textile mills to put us though college and ensure we had opportunities. Today, my sister works at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and I have the privilege of leading the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science ). We exist because of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and our parents' belief in the vision of the United States as a shining city on a hill. My family's story is repeated by thousands of American scientists. These stories include uncertainty when an immigrant's status in America is in question. This uncertainty causes stress and the possibility that immigrants will leave and take their skills, talents, and humanity elsewhere. For the successful, these stories culminate with relief, celebration, and the pride of becoming a naturalized citizen. As President Reagan said, the United States is the one place in the world where “anybody from any corner of the world can come…to live and become an American.” Naturalized citizens love the United States deeply because they chose to be American. They and other immigrants make huge contributions to science and engineering. According to the National Science Foundation, more than 50% of postdocs and 28% of science and engineering faculty in the United States are immigrants. Of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics awarded to Americans since 2000, 38% were awarded to immigrants to the United States. I don't know the number of prizes given to second-generation Americans but Steven Chu—current chair of the AAAS Board of Directors—is among them. The incredible achievements of the American scientific enterprise speak volumes about the vision and forethought of the American people who have worked to create a more perfect union. Suspending legal immigration is self-defeating and breaks a model that is so successful that other nations are copying it. As Thomas Donohue, chief executive officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said regarding the administration's proclamation, “Putting up a ‘not welcome’ sign for engineers, executives, IT experts, doctors, nurses, and other workers won't help our country, it will hold us back. Restrictive changes to our nation's immigration system will push investment and economic activity abroad, slow growth, and reduce job creation.” To develop treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, cure cancers, go to Mars, understand the fundamental laws of the universe and human behavior, develop artificial intelligence, and build a better future, we need the brain power of the descendants of Native Americans, Pilgrims, Founding Mothers and Fathers, Enslaved People, Ellis Island arrivals, and immigrants from everywhere. The United States has thrived as a crossroads where people are joined together by ideas and contribute by choice to the freedom and opportunity provided by this wonderful, inspiring, and flawed country that is always striving to live up to its aspirations. Scientists, look around your labs and offices. Think about your collaborations and friendships. We must ensure that this “temporary” restriction on legal immigration does not become permanent. Now is the time to speak up for your immigrant colleagues and for America.

Online retailers have long lured customers with the ability to browse vast selections of merchandise from home, quickly compare prices and offers, and have goods conveniently delivered to their doorstep. But much of the in-person shopping experience has been lost, not the least of which is trying on clothes to see how they fit, how the colors work with your complexion, and so on. Companies like Stitch Fix, Wantable, and Trunk Club have attempted to address this problem by hiring professionals to choose clothes based on your custom parameters and ship them out to you. You can try things on, keep what you like, and send back what you don't. Stitch Fix's version of this service is called Fixes.

This past week, as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival, I spoke with Kai-Fu Lee, the president and chair of Sinovation Ventures and a pioneer in artificial intelligence. We discussed his recent argument that AI has been of limited use in the response to the coronavirus crisis. And then we talked about the future of work and why he thinks that Covid-19 is going to accelerate trends toward automation. Because of the virus, and because of the way we all work now, we're going to have many more robots and other machines in our factories, restaurants, and kitchens. A lightly edited transcript is below.

Thanks to its high bandwidth, low latency, and the ability to support higher end-point densities, 5G will allow companies to collect more data, analyze the data more quickly, make better predictions, and rapidly take action. I spoke with Bill Menezes, Sr. Principal Analyst with Gartner, about how 5G will affect data analytics and IoT technology. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. Bill Detwiler: So Bill, tell me a little bit about how you see 5G affecting IoT technology, maybe, in the near term. Is it going to have much effect at all as we look at maybe one, two years into the future?

Go Moment is the home of the smart concierge Ivy that is well known in the hospitality industry. Singh is also a product design expert and public speaker, and blogs at RajSinghLA.com. Rathinam is also well known and loved in the Seattle tech community and as a mentor to local startups. I caught up with the two of them, in the course of curating and hosting the Rethink CX webinar series sponsored by Freshworks. Like Paddy, I live in the Seattle, Washington area.)

This magic is performed using powerful AI software that has only recently become powerful enough to master this formidable challenge. But two French engineering students, Virgile Garnier and Juliette Breurec, decided to take it on and have created an simple, elegant approach to transforming hand-drawn visual diagrams into computer-based maps that can be modified and improved – and save their creators the hours that would be required to do this task manually. I recently interviewed them to learn more about doUmind – how they envisioned this remarkable tool, how it accomplishes this remarkable task and what's next for it. Chuck Frey: Where did you and Juliette come up with the idea for doUmind? Garnier and Breurec: We were both engineering students specializing in mechatronics at the end of our studies at our university, IMT Mines Alès.

A study led by University of Toronto alumna Kimberly Ren is among the first to quantify predictors that could lead women towards, or away from, pursuing careers in machine learning and artificial intelligence, or AI. Women currently make up 22 per cent of global AI professionals, with that proportion oscillating between 21 per cent and 23 per cent over a four-year trend, according to a 2018 report by the World Economic Forum. "The talent gap isn't closing," says Ren, who recently graduated from the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and was awarded the Best Paper Award at the American Society for Engineering Education Conference for her fourth-year thesis project. She led the study under the supervision of Alison Olechowski, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering. "What I hope this research does is find some reasoning behind this gap, so that we can increase the persistence of women in the field going forward."

Go Moment is the home of the smart concierge Ivy that is well known in the hospitality industry. Singh is also a product design expert and public speaker, and blogs at RajSinghLA.com. Rathinam is also well known and loved in the Seattle tech community and as a mentor to local startups. I caught up with the two of them, in the course of curating and hosting the Rethink CX webinar series sponsored by Freshworks. Like Paddy, I live in the Seattle, Washington area.)

Organizers of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) have announced this year's Test of Time award, which goes to a team from the California Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Saarland University. The ICML Test of Time award recognizes an ICML paper from ten years ago that has proven influential, with significant impacts in the field, "including both research and practice." Authors: Niranjan Srinivas, Andreas Krause, Sham Kakade, Matthias Seeger Institutions: California Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Saarland University Abstract: Many applications require optimizing an unknown, noisy function that is expensive to evaluate. We formalize this task as a multiarmed bandit problem, where the payoff function is either sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) or has low RKHS norm. We resolve the important open problem of deriving regret bounds for this setting, which imply novel convergence rates for GP optimization.