There were seven interesting and varied invited talks at NeurIPS this year. Here, we summarise the first three, which were given by Charles Isbell (Georgia Tech), Jeff Shamma (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) and Shafi Goldwasser (UC Berkeley, MIT and Weizmann Institute of Science). The invited talks kicked off in style with a presentation from Charles Isbell. He had posted a teaser on Twitter indicating that he was trying something new with the format, and it certainly did not disappoint. The talk received rave reviews during both the live chat channel and afterwards on social media.

In June, a crisis erupted in the artificial intelligence world. Conversation on Twitter exploded after a new tool for creating realistic, high-resolution images of people from pixelated photos showed its racial bias, turning a pixelated yet recognizable photo of former President Barack Obama into a high-resolution photo of a white man. Researchers soon posted images of other famous Black, Asian, and Indian people, and other people of color, being turned white. Two well-known AI corporate researchers -- Facebook's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, and Google's co-lead of AI ethics, Timnit Gebru -- expressed strongly divergent views about how to interpret the tool's error. A heated, multiday online debate ensued, dividing the field into two distinct camps: Some argued that the bias shown in the results came from bad (that is, incomplete) data being fed into the algorithm, while others argued that it came from bad (that is, short-sighted) decisions about the algorithm itself, including what data to consider.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now we continue our special series on Rethinking College with a look at graduate students who pay little or even nothing for a top 10 master's degree program. HARI SREENIVASAN: It's graduation day, and these two students are earning their computer science master's degree from a top 10 program in the country. But it's the first time they have ever visited campus. VANESSA ANDERSON, Graduate: This whole experience was very surreal. This is my first time on campus, being here.

In this article, ten questions about MOOCs (crowdsourced from the recipients of the AAAI and SIGCSE mailing lists) were posed by editors Michael Wollowski, Todd Neller, James Boerkoel to Douglas H. Fisher, Charles Isbell Jr., and Michael Littman — educators with unique, relevant experiences to lend their perspective on those issues.