Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the need for new technology to support the reading process grows. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. The PDF format for sharing research papers is widely used due to its portability, but it has significant downsides including: static content, poor accessibility for low-vision readers, and difficulty reading on mobile devices. This paper explores the question "Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces -- even for legacy PDFs?" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we've developed ten research prototype interfaces and conducted usability studies with more than 300 participants and real-world users showing improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production reading interface for research papers that will incorporate the best features as they mature. We structure this paper around challenges scholars and the public face when reading research papers -- Discovery, Efficiency, Comprehension, Synthesis, and Accessibility -- and present an overview of our progress and remaining open challenges.

Fine manipulation tasks, such as threading cable ties or slotting a battery, are notoriously difficult for robots because they require precision, careful coordination of contact forces, and closed-loop visual feedback. Performing these tasks typically requires high-end robots, accurate sensors, or careful calibration, which can be expensive and difficult to set up. Can learning enable low-cost and imprecise hardware to perform these fine manipulation tasks? We present a low-cost system that performs end-to-end imitation learning directly from real demonstrations, collected with a custom teleoperation interface. Imitation learning, however, presents its own challenges, particularly in high-precision domains: errors in the policy can compound over time, and human demonstrations can be non-stationary. To address these challenges, we develop a simple yet novel algorithm, Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), which learns a generative model over action sequences. ACT allows the robot to learn 6 difficult tasks in the real world, such as opening a translucent condiment cup and slotting a battery with 80-90% success, with only 10 minutes worth of demonstrations. Project website: https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/

Dukes and Jackson, both with No Left Turn in Education, said parents should be concerned about how AI is being used in schools, and what information it may gather on students. Educators at over 120 districts across the country are implementing a pervasive school curriculum that has been denounced by opponents as an effort to manipulate children's values and beliefs and replace parents as the primary moral authority in their child's lives, with many critics specifically pointing to similarities with programs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a major point of contention. The School Superintendent's Association (AASA), with the help of superintendents, board members and school administrators, is implementing the Learning 2025 program, which calls for an equity-focused, "holistic redesign" of the United States' public education system by 2025, in districts across the country The parents' advocacy group, No Left Turn in Education (NLTE), is sounding the alarm about the curriculum's alleged ties to the CDC, especially since Learning 2025 outlines its plans as a solution to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning 2025 frequently references the idea of a "Whole Child" educational framework to promote the notion that school districts should focus on a collective, whole community vision that is strikingly similar to the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) educational framework devised by the CDC. Both programs place a strong emphasis on students' and teachers' social and emotional health, including employee wellness programs, as well as psychological and social services like school-based health and counseling centers.

Natural language generation (NLG) is a process within artificial intelligence where computer systems produce human-comprehensible language texts from information. English as a foreign language (EFL) students' use of NLG tools might facilitate their idea generation, which is fundamental to creative writing. However, little is known about how EFL students interact with NLG tools to generate ideas. This study explores strategies adopted by EFL students when searching for ideas using NLG tools, evaluating ideas generated by NLG tools and selecting NLG tools for ideas generation. Four Hong Kong secondary school students attended workshops where they learned to write stories comprising their own words and words generated by NLG tools. After the workshops, they answered questions to reflect on their writing experience with NLG tools. In a thematic analysis of the written reflections, we found students may have existing ideas when searching for ideas and evaluating ideas with NLG tools. Students showed some aversion to ideas generated by NLG tools and selected NLG tools that generated a greater quantity of ideas. The findings inform our understanding of EFL students' concerns when using NLG tools for idea generation and can inform educators' instruction to implement NLG tools for classroom creative writing.

Individuals involved in gang-related activity use mainstream social media including Facebook and Twitter to express taunts and threats as well as grief and memorializing. However, identifying the impact of gang-related activity in order to serve community member needs through social media sources has a unique set of challenges. This includes the difficulty of ethically identifying training data of individuals impacted by gang activity and the need to account for a non-standard language style commonly used in the tweets from these individuals. Our study provides evidence of methods where natural language processing tools can be helpful in efficiently identifying individuals who may be in need of community care resources such as counselors, conflict mediators, or academic/professional training programs. We demonstrate that our binary logistic classifier outperforms baseline standards in identifying individuals impacted by gang-related violence using a sample of gang-related tweets associated with Chicago. We ultimately found that the language of a tweet is highly relevant and that uses of ``big data'' methods or machine learning models need to better understand how language impacts the model's performance and how it discriminates among populations.

We consider policy gradient methods for stochastic optimal control problem in continuous time. In particular, we analyze the gradient flow for the control, viewed as a continuous time limit of the policy gradient method. We prove the global convergence of the gradient flow and establish a convergence rate under some regularity assumptions. The main novelty in the analysis is the notion of local optimal control function, which is introduced to characterize the local optimality of the iterate.

Strong foundations in basic AI techniques are key to understanding more advanced concepts. We believe that introducing AI techniques, such as search methods, early in higher education helps create a deeper understanding of the concepts seen later in more advanced AI and algorithms courses. We present a project-based and competition-based bachelor course that gives second-year students an introduction to search methods applied to board games. In groups of two, students have to use network programming and AI methods to build an AI agent to compete in a board game tournament-othello was this year's game. Students are evaluated based on the quality of their projects and on their performance during the final tournament. We believe that the introduction of gamification, in the form of competition-based learning, allows for a better learning experience for the students.

College students Tabatha Fajardo, Jay Ram and Kyra Varnavas give their take on the development of AI in the classroom on'The Story.' Artificial intelligence experts have advised consumers to use caution and trust their instincts when encountering "hallucinations" from artificial intelligence chatbots. "The number-one piece is common sense," Kayle Gishen, chief technology officer of Florida-based tech company NeonFlux, told Fox News Digital. People should verify what they see, read or find on platforms such as ChatGPT through "established sources of information," he said. AI is prone to making mistakes -- "hallucinations" in tech terminology -- just like human sources. The word "hallucinations" refers to AI outputs "that are coherent but factually incorrect or nonsensical," said Alexander Hollingsworth of Oyova, an app developer and marketing agency in Florida.

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) is a recently emerging research topic that extends from the widely-investigated Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) by further having a few target samples labeled, i.e., the model is trained with labeled source samples, unlabeled target samples as well as a few labeled target samples. Compared with UDA, the key to SSDA lies how to most effectively utilize the few labeled target samples. Existing SSDA approaches simply merge the few precious labeled target samples into vast labeled source samples or further align them, which dilutes the value of labeled target samples and thus still obtains a biased model. To remedy this, in this paper, we propose to decouple SSDA as an UDA problem and a semi-supervised learning problem where we first learn an UDA model using labeled source and unlabeled target samples and then adapt the learned UDA model in a semi-supervised way using labeled and unlabeled target samples. By utilizing the labeled source samples and target samples separately, the bias problem can be well mitigated. We further propose a consistency learning based mean teacher model to effectively adapt the learned UDA model using labeled and unlabeled target samples. Experiments show our approach outperforms existing methods.

Bayesian models are a powerful tool for studying complex data, allowing the analyst to encode rich hierarchical dependencies and leverage prior information. Most importantly, they facilitate a complete characterization of uncertainty through the posterior distribution. Practical posterior computation is commonly performed via MCMC, which can be computationally infeasible for high dimensional models with many observations. In this article we discuss the potential to improve posterior computation using ideas from machine learning. Concrete future directions are explored in vignettes on normalizing flows, Bayesian coresets, distributed Bayesian inference, and variational inference.