A new software platform, created by two University of Toronto alumni, aims to make virtual classrooms more functional by providing real-time feedback and specific insights into how student understanding of mathematics is changing. Last March, Nived Kollanthara, an alumnus of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, was living in New York City, where he volunteered part-time at a shelter, helping kids with their math homework. When the pandemic hit, he realized right away the impact it would have. "The kids I work with need extra, individual attention to help them succeed in the classroom," Kollanthara says. "I was worried about how they would be getting that in a remote environment."

It's not a new concept that people are the core of any business. Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie knew more than 100 years ago the power of his employees when he said, "Take away my people but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory." Carnegie was speaking from gut instinct. He knew the value of the human element within a business and appreciated that value, working to increase revenues through an inspired, motivated and dedicated workforce.

Welcome to the September edition of our best and favorite articles in AI that were published this month. We are a Paris-based company that does Agile data development. This month, we spotted articles about AI surveillance, Deepfake, a documentary from the 60s and much more. Let's kick off with the comic of the month: Let's jump in 1960, we are ten years from HAL 9000 and the first personal computers but people are already thinking about the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, newspapers were full of articles about it.

Research has shown that a person's financial success is more dependent on the ability to deal with people than on professional knowledge. Sage advice, such as "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" and principles articulated in Carnegie's classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People," offer trusted rules-of-thumb for how people can successfully deal with each other. However, alternative philosophies for dealing with people have also emerged. The success of an AI system is likewise contingent on its ability to win friends and influence people. In this paper, we study how AI systems should be designed to win friends and influence people in repeated games with cheap talk (RGCTs). We create several algorithms for playing RGCTs by combining existing behavioral strategies (what the AI does) with signaling strategies (what the AI says) derived from several competing philosophies. Via user study, we evaluate these algorithms in four RGCTs. Our results suggest sufficient properties for AIs to win friends and influence people in RGCTs.

ORIGINALLY IT WAS Complex Information Processing. I thank John McDermott, Alan Perlis, Raj Reddy, and Herbert Simon for comments on an earlier draft. CMU have entered into it with the usual spirit and perseverance. CMU has never had an Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In the earliest to go around, and rather than becoming something separate, work on complex information processing simply became one more aspect of the new look in the science of decision making.

It's not every day that you find a scientific discovery in your basement. That's what happened to scientists at the Cargenie Observatory after they stumbled on a 1917 astronomical glass plate. They believe the plate offers the oldest evidence for a planet orbiting star. Previously it was thought, the first exoplanet detection was made 75 years later in 1992. The pull-out box shows the strong lines of the element calcium.

"Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business" (Random House) is Charles Duhigg's follow-up to his best-selling "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which was published in 2012. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that's familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives; the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate. What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made "West Side Story" and Disney's "Frozen" into mega-hits?

Originally it was Complex Information Processing. That was the name Herb Simon and I chose in 1956 to describe the area in which we are working. It didn't take long before it became Artificial Intelligence (AI). Coined by John McCarthy, that term has stuck firmly, despite continual grumblings that any other name would be twice as fair (though no grumblings by me; I like the present name). Complex Information processing lives on now only in the title of the CIP Working Papers, a series started by Herb Simon in 1956 and still accumulating entries (to 447). However, from about 1965 much of the work on artificial intelligence that was not related to psychology began to appear in technical reports of the Computer Science Department. These reports, never part of a coherent numbered series until 1978, proliferated in all directions. Starting in the early 1970s (on one can recall exactly when), they did become the subject of a general mailing and thus began to form what everyone thinks of as the CMU Computer Science Technical Reports.