How many times must a phenomenon occur before it graduates from a coincidence to a pattern? Usually, the answer depends on how unlikely, how far from the ordinary, and how (seemingly) inexplicable the phenomenon is. The more so, the lower the threshold. I was very surprised (and pleased) to read of this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics: John Hopfield, a professor of Molecular Biology and earlier of Chemistry and Biology, together with Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of Computer Science. Their affiliations name three major scientific fields, none of them being Physics!

Professor Marina Jirotka is a highly-respected Professor of Computer Science at Oxford and an international expert in Human Centred Computing and Responsible Innovation. She has been at the university for some 30 years – and yet, she smiles, she is not from a typical Oxford academic background. It really could have all been very different. Professor Jirotka's parents, academic chemists, came to this country on the eve of war from what was then Czechoslovakia. Refugees from Hitler, then Stalin, they settled in a small town in Scotland, with her grandparents; building a business and a new life far from home.

This drastic reduction in latency alone makes a number of futuristic technologies – such as autonomous vehicles – possible. The advent of cloud computing set off a colossal centralization fever that has caught almost every business that understands the importance of a digital-first business strategy. Even the world's governments and public sector organizations are leveraging the advantages offered by cloud computing. Easy access to data, powerful analytical tools, and improved business agility have enabled organizations to make more "intelligent" and informed decisions than ever before. However, over the next few years, a rival computing architecture approach – decentralization – will witness a sharp uptick in popularity, fueled by edge computing.

As technologists and artists in new media (that strange place where words, imagery, meaning and new tech collide), we design, build, and test software experiences and products that center the deep creative impulse of humanity, because we are interested in the power of that impulse. We've observed throughout our work that many computing and AI software and tools have underestimated, and even excluded, this human impulse from their design. The particular joy of uncovering patterns and logic embedded in various functions of the universe, and building things that make use of them for people to enjoy, is unparalleled. It's no surprise that as computing devices became more accessible and explainable, people fell in love with them. But today, many are becoming uncomfortable with their ubiquity and feel less understood and more constrained by computing and AI, and that they must fight or compete with the software and products sold to them.

Today, the practical synergies between economics and computer science are flourishing. We outline some of the many opportunities for the two disciplines to engage more deeply through the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing." Nancy L. Rose is the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics and head of the MIT Department of Economics, where her research and teaching focus on industrial organization, competition policy, and the economics of regulation. David Autor is the Ford Professor of Economics and co-director of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. His scholarship explores the labor market impacts of technological change and globalization, earnings inequality, and disability insurance and labor supply.

The term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was first coined in 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Since then, AI has had its ups and downs. The period between 1974 – 80 has become known as "AI Winter," because heavy criticism about its progress led to a reduction in both government interest and government funding. The field experienced another winter from 1987 – 93, which coincided with a collapsing market for early general-purpose computers. Things have changed significantly since then.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced a $1 billion initiative to reshape how the college operates and make artificial intelligence a part of its curriculum for all students. The shakeup is being made, MIT president L. Rafael Reif said, to "prepare students of today for the world of the future" and represents the biggest change to curriculum at the school since the 1950s. The effort will be spearheaded by a $350 million donation from from Blackstone investment firm CEO Stephen Schwarzman. An additional $300 million has been raised for the $1 billion project. The Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will work on incorporating computing and AI into all fields of study at MIT, encouraging cross-disciplinary endeavors, and exploring ways to create a shared structure between the university's five existing schools.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced a $1 billion initiative to reshape how the college operates and make artificial intelligence a part of its curriculum for all students. The shakeup is being made, MIT president L. Rafael Reif said, to "prepare students of today for the world of the future" and represents the biggest change to curriculum at the school since the 1950s. The effort will be spearheaded by a $350 million donation from from Blackstone investment firm CEO Stephen Schwarzman. An additional $300 million has been raised for the $1 billion project. The Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will work on incorporating computing and AI into all fields of study at MIT, encouraging cross-disciplinary endeavors, and exploring ways to create a shared structure between the university's five existing schools.

Ever since the beginning of the AI boom in the early 2010s, there's been a corresponding drought in talented AI developers and researchers. The way to fix this is to educate more of them, and today, MIT announced a $1 billion initiative to do exactly that: it will establish a new college of computing to train the next generation of machine learning mavens. Instead, it will focus on what MIT president L. Rafael Reif calls "the bilinguals of the future." By that, he means students in fields like biology, chemistry, physics, politics, history, and linguistics who also know how to apply machine learning to these disciplines. Two-thirds of the planned $1 billion commitment has been raised so far, with $350 million coming from Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is pumping $1 billion into a new center for the study of the "global opportunities and challenges presented by the prevalence of computing and the rise of artificial intelligence," the school said Monday. In a statement, MIT said the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will open in September 2019 as "an interdisciplinary hub for work in computer science, AI, data science, and related fields." A $350 million foundational gift from Schwarzman, head of the massive investment firm Blackstone, will get the project rolling. In addition to Schwarzman's gift, MIT has raised another $300 million for the college that bears his name, with further fundraising being "actively pursued" to raise the $1 billion needed for the learning hub, the statement said. "The College's attention to ethics matters enormously to me, because we will never realize the full potential of these advancements unless they are guided by a shared understanding of their moral implications for society," Schwarzman said in the release.