I'm excited to announce that School of AI is now accepting applications for our research division! We'll select 10 Fall 2018 Fellows and give them 1000 USD in Google Cloud credits each, a personal advisor, and help them submit their work to relevant academic outlets like NIPS and popular journals. Also, 2 reinforcement learning engineers (Laura Graesser and Keng Wah Loon) and I have recently published a static and dynamic version of our white paper titled "SLM Lab". This is a framework for RL research, and we hope that the dynamic version of the paper serves as an example to School of AI researchers. We want our research to be clear, communicative, and applied.

Microsoft and National Geographic are partnering on a new grant program that will put $1 million towards projects using AI to address environmental challenges. Between five and 15 projects will be selected as recipients of the AI for Earth Innovation Grant program and winning researchers will receive funding, access to Microsoft cloud and AI tools, inclusion in the National Geographic Explorer Community and affiliation with National Geographic Labs. "Microsoft is constantly exploring the boundaries of what technology can do, and what it can do for people and the world," Lucas Joppa, chief environmental scientist at Microsoft, said in a statement. "We believe that humans and computers, working together through AI, can change the way that society monitors, models and manages Earth's natural systems." In a similar vein, Google just announced a partnership with UN Environment that will provide real-time data to organizations and governments about the impact of human activity on ecosystems.