This story about intelligence testing in schools was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Even before her son started kindergarten, Ashley Meier Barlow realized that she might have to fight for his education. Her son has Down syndrome; when he was in prekindergarten, school officials in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, told Barlow that he wouldn't be going to the neighborhood school, with some special education accommodations, as she had assumed. Instead, the educators told Barlow that they wanted her son to attend a classroom across town meant for children who are profoundly impacted by their disabilities. Barlow immediately resisted because she knew the curriculum would likely focus on life skills, and her son might never be taught much reading beyond learning the shape of common, functional words like stop and exit.

This article introduces Lester, a novel method to automatically synthetise retro-style 2D animations from videos. The method approaches the challenge mainly as an object segmentation and tracking problem. Video frames are processed with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and the resulting masks are tracked through subsequent frames with DeAOT, a method of hierarchical propagation for semi-supervised video object segmentation. The geometry of the masks' contours is simplified with the Douglas-Peucker algorithm. Finally, facial traits, pixelation and a basic shadow effect can be optionally added. The results show that the method exhibits an excellent temporal consistency and can correctly process videos with different poses and appearances, dynamic shots, partial shots and diverse backgrounds. The proposed method provides a more simple and deterministic approach than diffusion models based video-to-video translation pipelines, which suffer from temporal consistency problems and do not cope well with pixelated and schematic outputs. The method is also much most practical than techniques based on 3D human pose estimation, which require custom handcrafted 3D models and are very limited with respect to the type of scenes they can process.

But Jenna Lester, a dermatologist at the University of California San Francisco, was growing frustrated with the poor quality images she'd receive of her dark-skinned patients. It wasn't just a cosmetic issue -- the bad photos meant darker-skinned people weren't getting the same quality of care. So in January, Lester co-authored a paper in the British Journal of Dermatology that gives a step-by-step guide to photographing skin of color accurately in clinical settings. Lester, who herself is Black, said, "I feel like these issues and my life is constantly me saying, 'Hey, what about us?' 'What about these patients?'" Medical photographs are vital to documenting disease in textbooks and journals and training medical students.

It's something most people use without realizing it. From phones to search engines, social media, and smart devices in homes -- each uses artificial intelligence technology. "When we have our conversational assistance in our homes and we're talking with one of these and we're asking what's the weather going to be like or what's the capital of Tanzania. Those are kind of questions that are easy to answer," said North Carolina State University Distinguished Professor James Lester. Lester is also the Director of the Center for Educational Informatics where they conduct research on AI technologies for education.

A global Forrester study commissioned by LogMeIn has pointed to a widening gap between the leaders and laggards in customer experience (CX). CX has matured this year, according to LogMeIn, but at the same time the drive for digital transformation is now means some are making bigger moves towards data-based intelligence, including AI. The Forrester study, Short-Term Wins and Continuous Optimisation: The Roadmap To Customer Engagement Success, surveyed 463 global CX decision makers and found that the customer engagement maturity gap is widening as more channels emerge. Organisations must look to establish a foothold with artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate their CX maturity, it suggests. Ryan Lester, senior director of customer experience technologies at LogMeIn, said that in a changing landscape of customer expectations and preferences, companies must be agile when it comes to their customer engagement strategy.

Television game shows have made dating a form of entertainment for the masses for decades. More recently reality TV has adopted the genre, with hits like Love Island and First Dates. Now the phenomenon has moved online - and anyone can play. "I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was so nervous to even say, 'Hi'. The first time I saw him smiling, my heart told me. 'That's the one, I'm going to make that man happy whatever it takes."

There were three invited talks at this year's virtual ICML. The first was given by Lester Mackey, and he highlighted some of his efforts to do some good with machine learning. During the talk he also outlined several ways in which social good efforts can be organised, and described numerous social good problems that would benefit from the community's attention. Lester took the audience on a journey from his grad school days to the present, focusing on the social good projects he's been involved in along the way. His research in this area has included efforts to combat nuclear proliferation, climate forecasting, and COVID-19 work.

Before a rapt, standing-room-only audience of more than 300 students, faculty, and other members of the Law School community, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith '84 returned to campus on October 1 to discuss his new book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age (cowritten with Carol Ann Browne). The event with Gillian Lester, Dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law of Columbia Law School, and Professor Tim Wu, a leading authority on antitrust law who advocates for breaking up Big Tech companies, was the season's first installment of the Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series. "Brad may be the only tech executive who would willingly share the stage with Professor Wu, given Tim's strong and well-articulated position on the perils associated with the bigness of today's technology companies," said Dean Lester in her introduction. The conversation touched on a number of pressing concerns, including cybersecurity, government regulation, ethics, and human rights. Smith's book addresses the untold ramifications of digital technology's ubiquity in our personal lives, our societies, and our economies.

Here's a science fiction premise you've probably heard before: a person encounters a shadowy company that sells hyper-realistic virtual experiences. They're put into an incredibly vivid simulated reality through some kind of brainwave helmet or injected drug. Then something goes wrong and the protagonist discovers -- say it with me now -- that the experience isn't virtual at all. The new film Empathy, Inc. is nominally one of these stories. Written by author Mark Leidner and directed by Yedidya Gorsetman, the film premiered at the Cinepocalypse festival in 2018, and it's getting a wider theatrical release this week.

Experience Management studies AI systems that automatically adapt interactive experiences such as games to tailor to specific players and to fulfill design goals. Although it has been explored for several decades, existing work in experience management has mostly focused on single-player experiences. This paper is a first attempt at identifying the main challenges to expand EM to multi-player/multi-user games or experiences. We also make connections to related areas where solutions for similar problems have been proposed (especially group recommender systems) and discusses the potential impact and applications of multi-player EM.