Using analogical model formulation with sketches to solve Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test problems.

A week after Donald Trump's election, a thirty-year-old cognitive scientist named Maya Shankar purchased a plane ticket to Flint, Michigan. Shankar held one of the more unorthodox jobs in the Obama White House, running the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, also known as the President's "nudge unit." When she launched the team, in early 2014, it felt, Shankar recalls, "like a startup in my parents' basement"--no budget, no mandate, no bona-fide employees. Within two years, the small group of scientists had become a staff of dozens--including an agricultural economist, an industrial psychologist, and "human-centered designers"--working with more than twenty federal agencies on seventy projects, from fixing gaps in veterans' health care to relieving student debt. Usually, the initiatives had, at their core, one question: Could the growing body of knowledge about the quirks of the human brain be used to improve public policy? For months, Shankar had been thinking about how to bring behavioral science to bear on the problems in Flint, where a crisis stemming from lead contamination of the drinking water had stretched on for almost two years. She wondered if lessons from the beleaguered city could inform the Administration's approach to the broader threat posed by lead across America--in pipes, in paint, in dust, and in soil. "Flint is not the only place poisoning kids," Shankar said. In recent years, behavioral science has become a voguish field. In 2002, the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work with a colleague, Amos Tversky, exploring the peculiarities of human decision-making in the face of uncertainty. A basic premise of the discipline they'd helped to create was that people's cognition is bias-prone, and susceptible to the cognitive equivalent of optical illusions. As a result, small tweaks of presentation or circumstance could make a major difference: if a judge rendered a decision about granting parole just before a meal, the inmate's odds for a favorable outcome dipped to near zero; just after the judge ate, the chances rose to around sixty-five per cent. Grocers had learned that they could sell double the amount of soup if they placed a sign above their cans reading "limit of 12 per person." But, for all the field's potential, its advances seemed mostly to have served the private sector. A prominent exception was the "nudge," a notion advanced by the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, now at Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago behavioral economist Richard Thaler, in their 2008 best-seller "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

Good communication is vital in health care, both among health care professionals, and between health care professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying, and even more convincing than the structured data, even when presented in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural language generation. These techniques are concerned with how the content, organization and language used in a document can be dynamically selected, depending on the audience and context. They have been used to generate health education materials, explanations and critiques in decision support systems, and medical reports and progress notes. Effective communication is vital in health care, both between health care providers and their patients and among health care providers themselves. Different participants in the health care process--consultants, nurses, general practitioners, medical researchers, patients, their relatives, and even accountants and administrators--must all be able to obtain and communicate relevant information on patients and their treatment. But there are many obstacles in the way of effective communication: Participants may use different terms to describe the same thing--a particular problem for patients who do not understand medical terminology. Different participants frequently have different information needs and little time to filter information, so that no single report is truly adequate for all.

Victor David Scheinman, a pioneer in industrial robotics and a longtime Woodside resident, died Tuesday, Sept. 20, of complications of heart disease. Mr. Scheinman, starting as a graduate student at Stanford University, developed a robotic arm that allowed the use of robotics in industry to leap forward. A version of the arm, called the Scheinman Arm, was used for research in dozens of research labs, inspiring a generation of robotics engineers. Stanford professor Bernie Roth, who was at first Mr. Scheinman's adviser at Stanford and later his close friend, said that Mr. Scheinman's robotic arm was unique because it included sensors that gave the feedback to the computer controlling it. Professor Roth said Mr. Scheinman was "tenacious and very active," always trying to figure out how things worked and fixing anything that was broken.

The 2012 publication Race against the Machine makes the case that the digitalization of work activities is proceeding so rapidly as to cause dislocations in the job market beyond anything previously experienced [1]. Unlike past mechanization/automation, which affected lower-skill blue-collar and white-collar work, today's information technology affects workers high in the education and skill distribution. Machines can substitute for brains as well as brawn. On one estimate, about 47% of total US employment is at risk of computerization [2]. If you doubt whether a robot or some other machine equipped with digital intelligence connected to the internet could outdo you or me in our work in the foreseeable future, consider news reports about an IBM program to "create" new food dishes (chefs beware), the battle between anesthesiologists and computer programs/robots that do their job much cheaper, and the coming version of Watson ("twice as powerful as the original") based on computers connected over the internet via IBM's Cloud [3]. On the darker side, you do not have to be paranoid to be paranoid about the potential technologies that the super-secret computers of the US National Security Agency (NSA) have on their digital drawing-boards.

This fall, Nueva students had their first opportunity to take a computer science elective in machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence. Thirty students worked on programs that, in essence, teach computers how to learn from data and adapt on their own. Through their projects they sought insights in everything from crime statistics to Shakespeare plays. Nueva is one of the few high schools in the United States to offer machine learning. The school decided to offer the class in response to several students who had been self-teaching for the last two years and expressed a strong interest in the topic.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2017, Baidu chief scientist, Coursera co-founder, and Stanford adjunct professor Andrew Ng spoke at the Stanford MSx Future Forum. The Future Forum is a discussion series that explores the trends that are changing the future. During his talk, Professor Ng discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming industry after industry.

The problem of ordering documents in a large collection into a sequence that is efficient for learning (both human and machine) is of high practical significance, but has not yet been well-formulated. We formulate this problem as mining a maximally informative simple sequence of documents. The mined sequence should be maximally informative in the sense that the reader learns quickly by reading only a few documents, and it should be simple so that the reader is not overwhelmed while trying to learn the content. The task can be posed as: Given that a reader wishes to read (at most) k documents, which documents should be selected from the repository and in what order, so as to provide maximum information. We present the WikiSeq algorithm for this purpose. We also design a metric based on information-gain to help objectively evaluate WikiSeq, and conduct experiments to compare with indicative baselines. Finally, we provide case-studies to subjectively illustrate WikiSeq’s merits.

We have conducted a study investigating the use of automated tutors for educating players in the context of serious gaming (i.e., game designed as a professional training tool). Historically, researchers and practitioners have developed automated tutors through a process of manually codifying domain knowledge and translating that into a human-interpretable format. This process is laborious and leaves much to be desired. Instead, we seek to apply novel machine learning techniques to, first, learn a model from domain experts' demonstrations how to solve such problems, and, second, use this model to teach novices how to think like experts. In this work, we present a study comparing the performance of an automated and a traditional, manually-constructed tutor. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation using learning from demonstration techniques to learn from experts and use that knowledge to teach novices.

Many prediction problems can be phrased as inferences over local neighborhoods of graphs. The graph represents the interaction between entities, and the neighborhood of each entity contains information that allows the inferences or predictions. We present an approach for applying machine learning directly to such graph neighborhoods, yielding predictions for graph nodes on the basis of the structure of their local neighborhood and the features of the nodes in it. Our approach allows predictions to be learned directly from examples, bypassing the step of creating and tuning an inference model or summarizing the neighborhoods via a fixed set of hand-crafted features. The approach is based on a multi-level architecture built from Long Short-Term Memory neural nets (LSTMs); the LSTMs learn how to summarize the neighborhood from data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique on a synthetic example and on real-world data related to crowdsourced grading, Bitcoin transactions, and Wikipedia edit reversions.