I suspect we will see OSTP emphasize tech accountability under her leadership, which will be especially pertinent to hot button AI issues like facial recognition, algorithmic bias, data privacy, corporate influence on research, and the myriad of other issues that I write about in The Algorithm. Finally, Biden's new secretary of state made clear that technology will still be an important geopolitical force. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Antony Blinken remarked that there is "an increasing divide between techno democracies and techno autocracies. Whether techno democracies or techno autocracies are the ones who get to define how tech is used…will go a long way toward shaping the next decades." As pointed out by Politico, this most clearly is an allusion to China, and the idea that the US is in a race with the country to develop emerging technologies like AI and 5G.

Google's testimony to an Australian Senate committee on Friday threatening to withdraw its search services from Australia is chilling to anyone who cares about democracy. It marks the latest escalation in the globally significant effort to regulate the way the big tech platforms use news content to drive their advertising businesses and the catastrophic impact on the news media across the world. The news bargaining code, which would require Google and Facebook to negotiate a fair price for the use of news content, is the product of an 18-month process driven by the competition regulator. That legislation is currently before the Australian parliament, where a Senate committee is taking final submissions from interested parties. The Google bombshell makes explicit what has been a slowly escalating threat that a binding code would not be tenable.

A panel of parents give there take on the president's move to reopen schools on'Fox & amp; Friends.' Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is going all in on a push to reopen schools in the state for hybrid learning by the beginning of March. Hogan said during a news conference at St. John's College in Annapolis on Thursday that there is a growing consensus in the state and in the country that there is "no public health reason for county school boards to keep students out of schools" due to COVID-19. He argued that continuing down a path of virtual learning could lead to significant setbacks for students, especially among students of color and those from low-income families. "I understand that in earlier stages of the pandemic, that this was a very difficult decision for county school boards to make," Hogan added.

"The hang up is what's going on in the robot's head," she adds. Perceiving stimuli and calculating a response takes a "boatload of computation," which limits reaction time, says Neuman, who recently graduated with a PhD from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Neuman has found a way to fight this mismatch between a robot's "mind" and body. The method, called robomorphic computing, uses a robot's physical layout and intended applications to generate a customized computer chip that minimizes the robot's response time. The advance could fuel a variety of robotics applications, including, potentially, frontline medical care of contagious patients.

The tech giant says it will remove its main search function from Australia if it passes a new law.

The literature on using yield curves to forecast recessions typically measures the term spread as the difference between the 10-year and the three-month Treasury rates. Furthermore, using the term spread constrains the long- and short-term interest rates to have the same absolute effect on the recession probability. In this study, we adopt a machine learning method to investigate whether the predictive ability of interest rates can be improved. The machine learning algorithm identifies the best maturity pair, separating the effects of interest rates from those of the term spread. Our comprehensive empirical exercise shows that, despite the likelihood gain, the machine learning approach does not significantly improve the predictive accuracy, owing to the estimation error. Our finding supports the conventional use of the 10-year--three-month Treasury yield spread. This is robust to the forecasting horizon, control variable, sample period, and oversampling of the recession observations.

We outline a perspective of an entirely new research branch in Earth and climate sciences, where deep neural networks and Earth system models are dismantled as individual methodological approaches and reassembled as learning, self-validating, and interpretable Earth system model-network hybrids. Following this path, we coin the term "Neural Earth System Modelling" (NESYM) and highlight the necessity of a transdisciplinary discussion platform, bringing together Earth and climate scientists, big data analysts, and AI experts. We examine the concurrent potential and pitfalls of Neural Earth System Modelling and discuss the open question whether artificial intelligence will not only infuse Earth system modelling, but ultimately render them obsolete.

Stacking is a widely used model averaging technique that yields asymptotically optimal prediction among all linear averages. We show that stacking is most effective when the model predictive performance is heterogeneous in inputs, so that we can further improve the stacked mixture with a hierarchical model. With the input-varying yet partially-pooled model weights, hierarchical stacking improves average and conditional predictions. Our Bayesian formulation includes constant-weight (complete-pooling) stacking as a special case. We generalize to incorporate discrete and continuous inputs, other structured priors, and time-series and longitudinal data. We demonstrate on several applied problems.

Accountability is widely understood as a goal for well governed computer systems, and is a sought-after value in many governance contexts. But how can it be achieved? Recent work on standards for governable artificial intelligence systems offers a related principle: traceability. Traceability requires establishing not only how a system worked but how it was created and for what purpose, in a way that explains why a system has particular dynamics or behaviors. It connects records of how the system was constructed and what the system did mechanically to the broader goals of governance, in a way that highlights human understanding of that mechanical operation and the decision processes underlying it. We examine the various ways in which the principle of traceability has been articulated in AI principles and other policy documents from around the world, distill from these a set of requirements on software systems driven by the principle, and systematize the technologies available to meet those requirements. From our map of requirements to supporting tools, techniques, and procedures, we identify gaps and needs separating what traceability requires from the toolbox available for practitioners. This map reframes existing discussions around accountability and transparency, using the principle of traceability to show how, when, and why transparency can be deployed to serve accountability goals and thereby improve the normative fidelity of systems and their development processes.

NLP impacts how firms provide products to users, content individuals receive through search and social media, and how While artificial intelligence provides the backbone for many tools individuals interact with news and emails. Despite the growing people use around the world, recent work has brought to attention importance of NLP algorithms in shaping our lives, recently scholars, that the algorithms powering AI are not free of politics, stereotypes, policymakers, and the business community have raised the and bias. While most work in this area has focused on the ways alarm of how gender and racial biases may be baked into these algorithms. in which AI can exacerbate existing inequalities and discrimination, Because they are trained on human data, the algorithms very little work has studied how governments actively shape themselves can replicate implicit and explicit human biases and training data. We describe how censorship has affected the development aggravate discrimination [6, 8, 39]. Additionally, training data that of Wikipedia corpuses, text data which are regularly used over-represents a subset of the population may do a worse job for pre-trained inputs into NLP algorithms. We show that word embeddings at predicting outcomes for other groups in the population [13].