The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a proposed rule to limit the length of time international students can remain in the U.S. for their studies to four years. If finalized, the proposed rule set to be published on Thursday would limit how long certain visa holders, including foreign students, are allowed to stay in the U.S., according to a press release from the Department of Homeland Security, which said the proposal seeks to curb "visa abuse" and increase the agency's ability to "properly vet and oversee these individuals." The agency said foreign students have "taken advantage of U.S. generosity" and become "forever students" by remaining enrolled in colleges so they could stay in the U.S. The Trump administration announced a proposed rule to limit the length of time international students can remain in the U.S. for their studies to four years. "For too long, past Administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the U.S. virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks, costing untold amount of taxpayer dollars, and disadvantaging U.S. citizens," a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. "This new proposed rule would end that abuse once and for all by limiting the amount of time certain visa holders are allowed to remain in the U.S., easing the burden on the federal government to properly oversee foreign students and their history," the spokesperson continued. Since 1978, foreign students, or F visa holders, have been allowed to remain in the U.S. for their "duration of status," which means the time they were enrolled as a full-time student.

Despite their success in numerous fields, the potential of foundation models for modeling and understanding human behavior remains largely unexplored. We introduce Be.FM, one of the first open foundation models designed for human behavior modeling. Built upon open-source large language models and fine-tuned on a diverse range of behavioral data, Be.FM can be used to understand and predict human decision-making. We construct a comprehensive set of benchmark tasks for testing the capabilities of behavioral foundation models. Our results demonstrate that Be.FM can predict behaviors, infer characteristics of individuals and populations, generate insights about contexts, and apply behavioral science knowledge.

As Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly undertake real-world tasks and engage with human society, how well do we understand their behaviors? We (1) investigate how LLM agents' prosocial behaviors -- a fundamental social norm -- can be induced by different personas and benchmarked against human behaviors; and (2) introduce a behavioral and social science approach to evaluate LLM agents' decision-making. We explored how different personas and experimental framings affect these AI agents' altruistic behavior in dictator games and compared their behaviors within the same LLM family, across various families, and with human behaviors. The findings reveal substantial variations and inconsistencies among LLMs and notable differences compared to human behaviors. Merely assigning a human-like identity to LLMs does not produce human-like behaviors. Despite being trained on extensive human-generated data, these AI agents are unable to capture the internal processes of human decision-making. Their alignment with human is highly variable and dependent on specific model architectures and prompt formulations; even worse, such dependence does not follow a clear pattern. LLMs can be useful task-specific tools but are not yet intelligent human-like agents.

As scientists laid the foundations of artificial intelligence, Pamela McCorduck was there. McCorduck, an author who wrote some of the first novels and histories about AI and was a generous friend of CMU, died Oct. 18. McCorduck described herself as an eyewitness to the birth and growth of AI. She was possibly best known for her 1979 book, "Machines Who Think," which chronicles the history of AI from the dreams and nightmares of ancient poets and prophets to the scientific discoveries of the 20th century. The novel contains the famous quote, "Artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods."

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT's famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work. Greg's essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls "a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well." In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy. Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees. Below he speaks to two key organizers: Gideon Lichfield, the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter.

When you ask Amazon's Alexa, "What is Wikipedia?" Alexa took this line directly from Wikipedia's entry on Wikipedia, as it does with many of its answers. Perhaps what it should have said was this: "Wikipedia is the source from which I take much of my information, without credit, contribution, or compensation." Amazon recently donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running, as "part of Amazon's and CEO Jeff Bezos' growing work in philanthropy," according to CNET. It's being framed as a "gift," one that--as Amazon puts it--recognizes their shared vision to "make it easier to share knowledge globally."

The year 2017 has a surprise in store if you oppose Donald Trump and his policies. So far you've probably been trying to manage a wild range of emotions: fear and panic about executive orders; disbelief as his most avid supporters buy his verifiable lies; shock with every revelation about Russiagate. Now here's the surprise: 2017 will be the year you learn the value of practicing kindness -- at least if the resistance has anything to say about it. We know what you're thinking. Only saints, kindergarten teachers, and muppets are perpetually kind. The rest of us typically struggle to get through the day without side-eyeing a stranger or laying on the car horn in rush hour traffic.

Cooperation in the form of generosity has been observed to be contagious, with receipt of donations positively influencing their subsequent generosity,

With hands clasped and heads bowed, hundreds of USC students, faculty, staff and university leaders gathered at a memorial Monday for Bosco Tjan, a beloved neuroscience professor who was stabbed to death by a student on Friday, the last day of classes. "Tragically, Bosco died doing what he loved, doing what he believed in -- serving his students and building up a new generation of scholars," USC President C.L. Max Nikias said. "His achievements are real, his influence enduring." The shock of Tjan's death reverberated over the weekend through USC, where he had worked for more than 15 years and was considered a cornerstone of the neuroscience graduate program. He was a co-founder of the university's neuroimaging center, where he served as technical director, led a number of research projects and taught a lab course on functional imaging.