Trying to Make AI Less Squirrelly

You may have missed it, but the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) just announced its first annual Squirrel AI award winner: Regina Barzilay, a professor at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In fact, if you're like me, you may have missed that there was a Squirrel AI award. But there is, and it's kind of a big deal, especially for healthcare -- as Professor Barzilay's work illustrates. The Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity (Squirrel AI is a Chinese-based AI-powered "adaptive education provider") "recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects." The award carries a prize of $1,000,000, which is about the same as a Nobel Prize.