In 2015, Uber opened a research facility around the corner from Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center in a move positioned as a partnership between the two organizations. Within months, dozens of faculty members had left their positions for full-time roles at Uber, draining the center of much of its talent. Other major tech companies have followed a similar path – in 2018, Facebook launched AI labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh headed by former professors. These stories provide a window into a tug-of-war that's been playing out between the tech industry and academia. Keen to build products and services that use AI and machine learning, tech firms and other businesses have been hiring away researchers and professors from universities, creating a shortage of academics who can teach the next generation of data scientists. The proportion of computer science PhDs who stay in academia has reached a "historic low," the Computing Research Association has said.

Fire doesn't care what it destroys or who it kills--it spreads without mercy, leaving total destruction in its wake, as California's Camp and Woolsey fires proved so dramatically this month. But fire is to a large degree predictable. It follows certain rules and prefers certain fuels and follows certain wind patterns. That means its moves with a complexity that scientists can pick apart little by little, thanks to lasers, fancy sensors, and some of the most powerful computers on the planet. We can't end wildfires altogether, but by better understanding their dynamics, ideally we can stop a disaster like the destruction of Paradise from happening again.

"President Trump is a complete and total dipshit." So announced Barack Obama, in a video released on YouTube earlier this year. Uncharacteristic, certainly, but it appeared very real. It was, however, a falsified video made -- by BuzzFeed and the actor and director Jordan Peele -- with the help of artificial intelligence. Deepfakes, as they have been dubbed, are the most recent -- and perhaps most troubling -- manifestation in the evolving arms race of digital disinformation.

Grammarly has your back -- and also $110 million in funding, after its first venture round. Grammarly uses artificial intelligence to help fix spelling, grammar and syntax mistakes. You can use it as a Chrome extension, in Microsoft Office or as a Windows app. Silicon Valley venture capitalist General Catalyst led the funding round, reports Bloomberg, and was joined by IVP, Spark Capital, Breyer Capital and SignalFire. Grammarly has around 6.9 million users and a $12-per-month premium option that corrects "complex writing issues."

Bad hair days may soon be prevented by just looking at your smart phone. Parham Aarabi and Wenzhi Guo, researchers at the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, have developed a machine learning algorithm that learns directly from human instructions rather than an existing set of examples. The algorithm outperformed conventional methods of training neural networks by 160 percent and outperformed its own training by 9 percent. The algorithm is seen as a significant leap forward for artificial intelligence as it learned to recognize hair in pictures with greater reliability than that enabled by the training. The two researchers were able to train the algorithm to identify people's hair in photographs--a much more difficult task for computers than it is for humans.