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Ed (chatbot)

Ed was a chatbot co-developed by the Los Angeles Unified School District and AllHere Education. Described as a learning acceleration platform, it was the first personal assistant for students in the United States. Part of the district's Individual Acceleration Plan, it was able to interact with students both verbally and visually, offering support in 100 languages. The chatbot was launched on March 20, 2024, as part of the district's plan for academic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and to improve overall academic performance. Utilizing artificial intelligence, Ed organizes data and reports on grades, test scores, and attendance, creating individualized plans for each student. After the company behind it, AllHere, collapsed, the district shuttered operations of the chatbot on June 14, 2024. The firm is under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. == History == On February 14, 2022, Alberto M. Carvalho became the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, pledging to give the district a full academic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2022, he announced the Individual Acceleration Plan for the district, which aimed to provide each student with a unique progress report and help them determine if they were on track to graduate. The district faced criticism from disability advocates for its management of Individualized Education Programs, and in April 2022, the United States Department of Education announced that the district had failed to provide appropriate educational services to students with disabilities during the pandemic. The district had been grappling with significant absenteeism issues since the pandemic, which led to declining academic performance and disengagement among students. On February 17, 2023, the district issued a request for proposals to develop a fully integrated portal system. Later that year, they signed a $6 million, five-year contract with AllHere Education, a Boston-based company founded in 2016. The introduction of Ed follows the public launch of ChatGPT, which has been utilized by both teachers and students in educational settings. On August 4, 2023, during an annual address at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Carvalho and the Los Angeles Unified School District announced the launch of Ed. The district invested $4 million into the chatbot, with Carvalho noting that this cost would be halved thanks to donor and grant funding. The chatbot was launched on March 20, 2024. Following its launch, a press conference was held to address security and technology concerns. Carvalho stated that the district had collaborated with security companies and incorporated filters to screen for threatening language. Months after its launch, AllHere Education furloughed most of its staff on June 14, citing their “current financial position” on its website as the reason. After learning about the furlough, the district terminated its dealings with AllHere Education. However, it stated its intention to bring the chatbot back in the future once officials determine the best course of action. Carvalho announced that he would appoint an independent task force to review what went wrong with AllHere Education and the chatbot. On February 25, 2026, the FBI served a search warrant on Carvalho’s home and office in connection with AllHere. The FBI also raided the LAUSD's headquarters. == Service == The chatbot was described as a personal assistant and a "one-stop shop for parents and students" who want to see information about a student's attendance and grades, as well as other resources from the district. Additionally, the application can function as an alarm clock, provide daily lunch menus from the school cafeteria, and offer updates on the location of school buses. The chatbot also helps students and parents who do not speak English as their first language by translating displayed information into approximately 100 different languages. The application can also help with submitting applications and give updates on progress and upcoming assignments. The district stated that the primary goal of Ed was to actively motivate students to complete homework and other tasks. == Reception == The chatbot received a mostly positive reception among parents and observers upon its launch. Some parents and teachers expressed caution about the technology, voicing concerns that the district's push for its implementation lacked public accountability. Rob Nelson from the University of Pennsylvania described the district's strategy as risky, saying that the release felt "like the beginning of a Clippy-level disaster". After the chatbot's shutdown, The 74 criticized it for misusing student data. Chris Whiteley, a former software engineer at AllHere Education, alleged that the data collected by the chatbot likely violated the district's data privacy rules.
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United States Tech Force

The U.S. Tech Force (also styled as US Tech Force, Tech Force, or Government Tech Force) is a federal hiring initiative launched by the second Donald Trump administration in December 2025. The program, administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), aims to recruit about 1,000 early-career technology professionals into two-year government jobs to modernize federal IT systems, advance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and address technological gaps in government operations. The initiative is an effort to plug capability gaps created by Trump-administration efforts to shrink the federal government, which led to the departure of some 220,000 federal employees, including many in IT. The initiative seeks early-career workers; officials said it would offer competitive salaries and opportunities to work on high-impact government technology projects. Major technology companies—including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and OpenAI—agreed to help identify and refer candidates. Candidates are allowed to take Tech Force positions on leaves of absence and without divesting their stock, raising conflict-of-interest questions. In January 2026, OPM direction Scott Kupor said the deadline for applying to Tech Force was being extended because of "tremendous interest" without saying how many people had actually applied. Also in December 2025, news broke that the administration is planning another novel use of private-sector workers: hiring cybersecurity firms for offensive cyber operations.
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Connectionist expert system

Connectionist expert systems are artificial neural network (ANN) based expert systems where the ANN generates inferencing rules e.g., fuzzy-multi layer perceptron where linguistic and natural form of inputs are used. Apart from that, rough set theory may be used for encoding knowledge in the weights better and also genetic algorithms may be used to optimize the search solutions better. Symbolic reasoning methods may also be incorporated (see hybrid intelligent system). (Also see expert system, neural network, clinical decision support system.)
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Document classification

Document classification or document categorization is a problem in library science, information science and computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. This may be done "manually" (or "intellectually") or algorithmically. The intellectual classification of documents has mostly been the province of library science, while the algorithmic classification of documents is mainly in information science and computer science. The problems are overlapping, however, and there is therefore interdisciplinary research on document classification. The documents to be classified may be texts, images, music, etc. Each kind of document possesses its special classification problems. When not otherwise specified, text classification is implied. Documents may be classified according to their subjects or according to other attributes (such as document type, author, printing year etc.). In the rest of this article only subject classification is considered. There are two main philosophies of subject classification of documents: the content-based approach and the request-based approach. == "Content-based" versus "request-based" classification == Content-based classification is classification in which the weight given to particular subjects in a document determines the class to which the document is assigned. It is, for example, a common rule for classification in libraries, that at least 20% of the content of a book should be about the class to which the book is assigned. In automatic classification it could be the number of times given words appears in a document. Request-oriented classification (or -indexing) is classification in which the anticipated request from users is influencing how documents are being classified. The classifier asks themself: “Under which descriptors should this entity be found?” and “think of all the possible queries and decide for which ones the entity at hand is relevant” (Soergel, 1985, p. 230). Request-oriented classification may be classification that is targeted towards a particular audience or user group. For example, a library or a database for feminist studies may classify/index documents differently when compared to a historical library. It is probably better, however, to understand request-oriented classification as policy-based classification: The classification is done according to some ideals and reflects the purpose of the library or database doing the classification. In this way it is not necessarily a kind of classification or indexing based on user studies. Only if empirical data about use or users are applied should request-oriented classification be regarded as a user-based approach. == Classification versus indexing == Sometimes a distinction is made between assigning documents to classes ("classification") versus assigning subjects to documents ("subject indexing") but as Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster has argued, this distinction is not fruitful. "These terminological distinctions,” he writes, “are quite meaningless and only serve to cause confusion” (Lancaster, 2003, p. 21). The view that this distinction is purely superficial is also supported by the fact that a classification system may be transformed into a thesaurus and vice versa (cf., Aitchison, 1986, 2004; Broughton, 2008; Riesthuis & Bliedung, 1991). Therefore, assigning a subject term to a document in an index is equivalent to assigning that document to the class of documents indexed by that term (all documents indexed or classified as X belong to the same class of documents). == Automatic document classification (ADC) == Automatic document classification tasks can be divided into three sorts: supervised document classification where some external mechanism (such as human feedback) provides information on the correct classification for documents, unsupervised document classification (also known as document clustering), where the classification must be done entirely without reference to external information, and semi-supervised document classification, where parts of the documents are labeled by the external mechanism. There are several software products under various license models available. === Techniques === Automatic document classification techniques include: Artificial neural network Concept Mining Decision trees such as ID3 or C4.5 Expectation maximization (EM) Instantaneously trained neural networks Latent semantic indexing Multiple-instance learning Naive Bayes classifier Natural language processing approaches Rough set-based classifier Soft set-based classifier Support vector machines (SVM) K-nearest neighbour algorithms tf–idf == Applications == Classification techniques have been applied to spam filtering, a process which tries to discern E-mail spam messages from legitimate emails email routing, sending an email sent to a general address to a specific address or mailbox depending on topic language identification, automatically determining the language of a text genre classification, automatically determining the genre of a text readability assessment, automatically determining the degree of readability of a text, either to find suitable materials for different age groups or reader types or as part of a larger text simplification system sentiment analysis, determining the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document. health-related classification using social media in public health surveillance article triage, selecting articles that are relevant for manual literature curation, for example as is being done as the first step to generate manually curated annotation databases in biology
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Anna Becker

Anna Becker is an Israeli researcher known in the field of artificial intelligence and computer science within the financial field. == Early life and education == Becker was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel at 16 after graduating from a school in Moscow. At 17, she began her studies at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. During her master's degree in computer science, she taught first-year students of the same course, and at 27, Becker completed her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. == Career == While pursuing her PhD, Becker resolved an NP-complete approximation algorithm that had been unresolved for over twenty years. This made her a recognized scholar in the field. After completing her PhD, she developed an approximation technique by a factor of two. This technique is widely used today in operating systems, database systems, and VLSI chip designs. She then founded and sold Strategy Runner, a fintech software. After this, she founded EndoTech, an algorithmic trading platform based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. EndoTech's trading strategies have been operating in live cryptocurrency markets since 2017. The platform's BTC Alpha strategy has reported an average annual return of 163% on fixed capital over eight years of live operation, with a maximum drawdown of 14% and a trade accuracy rate of approximately 83%. In 2026, EndoTech entered a partnership with Bit1 Exchange to make its BTC Alpha and ETH Alpha copy trading strategies accessible to retail investors with no minimum deposit requirement, through a full-custody model in which user funds remain in their own exchange wallets at all times.As of 2023, Becker is working on Fianchetto Fund, an AI-based investing analysis platform. Becker has also co-authored a book on Bayesian networks, which has been published widely in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence.
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Automation in construction

Automation in construction is the combination of methods, processes, and systems that allow for greater machine autonomy in construction activities. Construction automation may have multiple goals, including but not limited to, reducing jobsite injuries, decreasing activity completion times, and assisting with quality control and quality assurance. Some systems may be fielded as a direct response to increasing skilled labor shortages in some countries. Opponents claim that increased automation may lead to less construction jobs and that software leaves heavy equipment vulnerable to hackers. Research insights on this subject are today published in several journals such as Automation in Construction by Elsevier. == Uses of automation in construction == Equipment control and management: Automation can be used to control and monitor construction equipment, such as cranes, excavators, and bulldozers. Material handling: Automated systems can be used to handle, transport, and place materials such as concrete, bricks, and stones. Surveying: Automated survey equipment and drones can be used to collect and analyze data on construction sites. Quality control: Automated systems can be used to monitor and control the quality of materials and construction processes. Safety management: Automated systems can be used to monitor and control safety conditions on construction sites. Scheduling and planning: Automated systems can be used to manage schedules, resources, and costs. Waste management: Automated systems can be used to manage and dispose of waste materials generated during construction. 3D printing: Automated 3D printing can be used to create prototypes, models, and even full-scale building components. == Autonomous heavy equipment == Advances in sensors, machine learning, and autonomous vehicle technology have led to the development of self-operating construction equipment and retrofit systems designed to automate excavators, bulldozers, tracked loaders, skid steer loaders, and haul trucks, allowing them to perform tasks with limited human supervision. Since 2017, tech companies have developed autonomous or semi-autonomous retrofit kits that can be installed on existing construction machinery. Examples include Bedrock Robotics, Built Robotics, and SafeAI, which develop sensor and software systems that enable excavators and other earthmoving machines to operate with varying degrees of autonomy. Major equipment manufacturers have also introduced autonomous capabilities: Caterpillar and John Deere have developed autonomous or semi-autonomous systems for construction and mining equipment, including haul trucks and earthmoving machines. == Transportation сonstruction == Kratos Defense & Security Solutions fielded the world’s first Autonomous Truck-Mounted Attenuator (ATMA) in 2017, in conjunction with Royal Truck & Equipment. == Benefits of automation in construction == The use of automation in construction has become increasingly prevalent in recent years due to its numerous benefits. Automation in construction refers to the use of machinery, software, and other technologies to perform tasks that were previously done manually by workers. One of the most significant benefits of automation in construction is increased productivity. Automation can help speed up construction processes, reduce project completion times, and improve overall efficiency. For example, using automated machinery for tasks such as concrete pouring, bricklaying, and welding can significantly increase the speed and accuracy of these tasks, allowing for more work to be completed in a shorter amount of time. Another benefit of automation in construction is improved safety. By automating tasks that are hazardous to workers, such as demolition or working at height, companies can reduce the risk of accidents and injuries on site. Automation can also help to reduce worker fatigue, which can be a significant factor in accidents and mistakes. Overall, the use of automation in construction can improve productivity, reduce costs, increase safety, and improve the quality of construction projects. As technology continues to advance, the use of automation is likely to become even more prevalent in the construction industry.
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Domain adaptation

Domain adaptation is a field associated with machine learning and transfer learning. It addresses the challenge of training a model on one data distribution (the source domain) and applying it to a related but different data distribution (the target domain). A common example is spam filtering, where a model trained on emails from one user (source domain) is adapted to handle emails for another user with significantly different patterns (target domain). Domain adaptation techniques can also leverage unrelated data sources to improve learning. When multiple source distributions are involved, the problem extends to multi-source domain adaptation. Domain adaptation is a specific type of transfer learning. According to the taxonomy laid out by Pan and Yang (2010), it falls into the category of transductive transfer learning. In this setting, the source and target tasks are the same (e.g., both are object recognition), but the domains differ (different marginal distributions). This distinguishes it from inductive transfer learning (where labeled data is available for the target task) and unsupervised transfer learning (where labels are unavailable in both domains). == Classification of domain adaptation problems == Domain adaptation setups are classified in two different ways: according to the distribution shift between the domains, and according to the available data from the target domain. === Distribution shifts === Common distribution shifts are classified as follows: Covariate Shift occurs when the input distributions of the source and destination change, but the relationship between inputs and labels remains unchanged. The above-mentioned spam filtering example typically falls in this category. Namely, the distributions (patterns) of emails may differ between the domains, but emails labeled as spam in the one domain should similarly be labeled in another. Prior Shift (Label Shift) occurs when the label distribution differs between the source and target datasets, while the conditional distribution of features given labels remains the same. An example is a classifier of hair color in images from Italy (source domain) and Norway (target domain). The proportions of hair colors (labels) differ, but images within classes like blond and black-haired populations remain consistent across domains. A classifier for the Norway population can exploit this prior knowledge of class proportions to improve its estimates. Concept Shift (Conditional Shift) refers to changes in the relationship between features and labels, even if the input distribution remains the same. For instance, in medical diagnosis, the same symptoms (inputs) may indicate entirely different diseases (labels) in different populations (domains). === Data available during training === Domain adaptation problems typically assume that some data from the target domain is available during training. Problems can be classified according to the type of this available data: Unsupervised: Unlabeled data from the target domain is available, but no labeled data. In the above-mentioned example of spam filtering, this corresponds to the case where emails from the target domain (user) are available, but they are not labeled as spam. Domain adaptation methods can benefit from such unlabeled data, by comparing its distribution (patterns) with the labeled source domain data. Semi-supervised: Most data that is available from the target domain is unlabelled, but some labeled data is also available. In the above-mentioned case of spam filter design, this corresponds to the case that the target user has labeled some emails as being spam or not. Supervised: All data that is available from the target domain is labeled. In this case, domain adaptation reduces to refinement of the source domain predictor. In the above-mentioned example classification of hair-color from images, this could correspond to the refinement of a network already trained on a large dataset of labeled images from Italy, using newly available labeled images from Norway. == Formalization == Let X {\displaystyle X} be the input space (or description space) and let Y {\displaystyle Y} be the output space (or label space). The objective of a machine learning algorithm is to learn a mathematical model (a hypothesis) h : X → Y {\displaystyle h:X\to Y} able to attach a label from Y {\displaystyle Y} to an example from X {\displaystyle X} . This model is learned from a learning sample S = { ( x i , y i ) ∈ ( X × Y ) } i = 1 m {\displaystyle S=\{(x_{i},y_{i})\in (X\times Y)\}_{i=1}^{m}} . Usually in supervised learning (without domain adaptation), we suppose that the examples ( x i , y i ) ∈ S {\displaystyle (x_{i},y_{i})\in S} are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution D S {\displaystyle D_{S}} of support X × Y {\displaystyle X\times Y} (unknown and fixed). The objective is then to learn h {\displaystyle h} (from S {\displaystyle S} ) such that it commits the least error possible for labelling new examples coming from the distribution D S {\displaystyle D_{S}} . The main difference between supervised learning and domain adaptation is that in the latter situation we study two different (but related) distributions D S {\displaystyle D_{S}} and D T {\displaystyle D_{T}} on X × Y {\displaystyle X\times Y} . The domain adaptation task then consists of the transfer of knowledge from the source domain D S {\displaystyle D_{S}} to the target one D T {\displaystyle D_{T}} . The goal is then to learn h {\displaystyle h} (from labeled or unlabelled samples coming from the two domains) such that it commits as little error as possible on the target domain D T {\displaystyle D_{T}} . The major issue is the following: if a model is learned from a source domain, what is its capacity to correctly label data coming from the target domain? == Four algorithmic principles == === Reweighting algorithms === The objective is to reweight the source labeled sample such that it "looks like" the target sample (in terms of the error measure considered). === Iterative algorithms === A method for adapting consists in iteratively "auto-labeling" the target examples. The principle is simple: a model h {\displaystyle h} is learned from the labeled examples; h {\displaystyle h} automatically labels some target examples; a new model is learned from the new labeled examples. Note that there exist other iterative approaches, but they usually need target labeled examples. === Search of a common representation space === The goal is to find or construct a common representation space for the two domains. The objective is to obtain a space in which the domains are close to each other while keeping good performances on the source labeling task. This can be achieved through the use of Adversarial machine learning techniques where feature representations from samples in different domains are encouraged to be indistinguishable. === Hierarchical Bayesian Model === The goal is to construct a Bayesian hierarchical model p ( n ) {\displaystyle p(n)} , which is essentially a factorization model for counts n {\displaystyle n} , to derive domain-dependent latent representations allowing both domain-specific and globally shared latent factors. == Software packages == Several compilations of domain adaptation and transfer learning algorithms have been implemented over the past decades: SKADA (Python) ADAPT (Python) TLlib (Python) Domain-Adaptation-Toolbox (MATLAB)
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Learning rate

In machine learning and statistics, the learning rate is a tuning parameter in an optimization algorithm that determines the step size at each iteration while moving toward a minimum of a loss function. Since it influences to what extent newly acquired information overrides old information, it metaphorically represents the speed at which a machine learning model "learns". In the adaptive control literature, the learning rate is commonly referred to as gain. In setting a learning rate, there is a trade-off between the rate of convergence and overshooting. While the descent direction is usually determined from the gradient of the loss function, the learning rate determines how big a step is taken in that direction. Too high a learning rate will make the learning jump over minima, but too low a learning rate will either take too long to converge or get stuck in an undesirable local minimum. In order to achieve faster convergence, prevent oscillations and getting stuck in undesirable local minima the learning rate is often varied during training either in accordance to a learning rate schedule or by using an adaptive learning rate. The learning rate and its adjustments may also differ per parameter, in which case it is a diagonal matrix that can be interpreted as an approximation to the inverse of the Hessian matrix in Newton's method. The learning rate is related to the step length determined by inexact line search in quasi-Newton methods and related optimization algorithms. == Learning rate schedule == Initial rate can be left as system default or can be selected using a range of techniques. A learning rate schedule changes the learning rate during learning and is most often changed between epochs/iterations. This is mainly done with two parameters: decay and momentum. There are many different learning rate schedules but the most common are time-based, step-based and exponential. Decay serves to settle the learning in a nice place and avoid oscillations, a situation that may arise when too high a constant learning rate makes the learning jump back and forth over a minimum, and is controlled by a hyperparameter. Momentum is analogous to a ball rolling down a hill; we want the ball to settle at the lowest point of the hill (corresponding to the lowest error). Momentum both speeds up the learning (increasing the learning rate) when the error cost gradient is heading in the same direction for a long time and also avoids local minima by 'rolling over' small bumps. Momentum is controlled by a hyperparameter analogous to a ball's mass which must be chosen manually—too high and the ball will roll over minima which we wish to find, too low and it will not fulfil its purpose. The formula for factoring in the momentum is more complex than for decay but is most often built in with deep learning libraries such as Keras. Time-based learning schedules alter the learning rate depending on the learning rate of the previous time iteration. Factoring in the decay the mathematical formula for the learning rate is: η n + 1 = η 0 1 + d n {\displaystyle \eta _{n+1}={\frac {\eta _{0}}{1+dn}}} where η {\displaystyle \eta } is the learning rate, η 0 {\displaystyle \eta _{0}} is the original learning rate, d {\displaystyle d} is a decay parameter and n {\displaystyle n} is the iteration step. Step-based learning schedules changes the learning rate according to some predefined steps. The decay application formula is here defined as: η n = η 0 d ⌊ 1 + n r ⌋ {\displaystyle \eta _{n}=\eta _{0}d^{\left\lfloor {\frac {1+n}{r}}\right\rfloor }} where η n {\displaystyle \eta _{n}} is the learning rate at iteration n {\displaystyle n} , η 0 {\displaystyle \eta _{0}} is the initial learning rate, d {\displaystyle d} is how much the learning rate should change at each drop (0.5 corresponds to a halving) and r {\displaystyle r} corresponds to the drop rate, or how often the rate should be dropped (10 corresponds to a drop every 10 iterations). The floor function ( ⌊ … ⌋ {\displaystyle \lfloor \dots \rfloor } ) here drops the value of its input to 0 for all values smaller than 1. Exponential learning schedules are similar to step-based, but instead of steps, a decreasing exponential function is used. The mathematical formula for factoring in the decay is: η n = η 0 e − d n {\displaystyle \eta _{n}=\eta _{0}e^{-dn}} where d {\displaystyle d} is a decay parameter. == Adaptive learning rate == The issue with learning rate schedules is that they all depend on hyperparameters that must be manually chosen for each given learning session and may vary greatly depending on the problem at hand or the model used. To combat this, there are many different types of adaptive gradient descent algorithms such as Adagrad, Adadelta, RMSprop, and Adam which are generally built into deep learning libraries such as Keras.
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United States Tech Force

The U.S. Tech Force (also styled as US Tech Force, Tech Force, or Government Tech Force) is a federal hiring initiative launched by the second Donald Trump administration in December 2025. The program, administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), aims to recruit about 1,000 early-career technology professionals into two-year government jobs to modernize federal IT systems, advance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and address technological gaps in government operations. The initiative is an effort to plug capability gaps created by Trump-administration efforts to shrink the federal government, which led to the departure of some 220,000 federal employees, including many in IT. The initiative seeks early-career workers; officials said it would offer competitive salaries and opportunities to work on high-impact government technology projects. Major technology companies—including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and OpenAI—agreed to help identify and refer candidates. Candidates are allowed to take Tech Force positions on leaves of absence and without divesting their stock, raising conflict-of-interest questions. In January 2026, OPM direction Scott Kupor said the deadline for applying to Tech Force was being extended because of "tremendous interest" without saying how many people had actually applied. Also in December 2025, news broke that the administration is planning another novel use of private-sector workers: hiring cybersecurity firms for offensive cyber operations.
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Moral outsourcing

Moral outsourcing is the placing of responsibility for ethical decision-making onto external entities, often algorithms. The term is often used in discussions of computer science and algorithmic fairness, but it can apply to any situation in which one appeals to outside agents in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for their actions. In this context, moral outsourcing specifically refers to the tendency of society to blame technology, rather than its creators or users, for any harm it may cause. == Definition == The term "moral outsourcing" was first coined by Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist concerned with the overlap between artificial intelligence and social issues. Chowdhury used the term to describe looming fears of a so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” following the rise of artificial intelligence. Moral outsourcing is often applied by technologists to shrink away from their part in building offensive products. In her TED Talk, Chowdhury gives the example of a creator excusing their work by saying they were simply doing their job. This is a case of moral outsourcing and not taking ownership for the consequences of creation. When it comes to AI, moral outsourcing allows for creators to decide when the machine is human and when it is a computer - shifting the blame and responsibility of moral plights off of the technologists and onto the technology. Conversations around AI and bias and its impacts require accountability to bring change. It is difficult to address these biased systems if their creators use moral outsourcing to avoid taking any responsibility for the issue. One example of moral outsourcing is the anger that is directed at machines for “taking jobs away from humans” rather than companies for employing that technology and jeopardizing jobs in the first place. The term "moral outsourcing" refers to the concept of outsourcing, or enlisting an external operation to complete specific work for another organization. In the case of moral outsourcing, the work of resolving moral dilemmas or making choices according to an ethical code is supposed to be conducted by another entity. == Real-world applications == In the medical field, AI is increasingly involved in decision-making processes about which patients to treat, and how to treat them. The responsibility of the doctor to make informed decisions about what is best for their patients is outsourced to an algorithm. Sympathy is also noted to be an important part of medical practice; an aspect that artificial intelligence, glaringly, is missing. This form of moral outsourcing is a major concern in the medical community. Another field of technology in which moral outsourcing is frequently brought up is autonomous vehicles. California Polytechnic State University professor Keith Abney proposed an example scenario: "Suppose we have some [troublemaking] teenagers, and they see an autonomous vehicle, they drive right at it. They know the autonomous vehicle will swerve off the road and go off a cliff, but should it?" The decision of whether to sacrifice the autonomous vehicle (and any passengers inside) or the vehicle coming at it will be written into the algorithms defining the car's behavior. In the case of moral outsourcing, the responsibility of any damage caused by an accident may be attributed to the autonomous vehicle itself, rather than the creators who wrote the protocol the vehicle will use to "decide" what to do. Moral outsourcing is also used to delegate the consequences of predictive policing algorithms to technology, rather than the creators or the police. There are many ethical concerns with predictive policing due to the fact that it results in the over-policing of low income and minority communities. In the context of moral outsourcing, the positive feedback loop of sending disproportionate police forces into minority communities is attributed to the algorithm and the data being fed into this system--rather than the users and creators of the predictive policing technology. == Outside of technology == === Religion === Moral outsourcing is also commonly seen in appeals to religion to justify discrimination or harm. In his book What It Means to be Moral, sociologist Phil Zuckerman contradicts the popular religious notion that morality comes from God. Religion is oftentimes cited as a foundation for a moral stance without any tangible relation between the religious beliefs and personal stance. In these cases, religious individuals will "outsource" their personal beliefs and opinions by claiming that they are a result of their religious identification. This is seen where religion is cited as a factor for political beliefs, medical beliefs, and in extreme cases an excuse for violence. === Manufacturing === Moral outsourcing can also be seen in the business world in terms of manufacturing goods and avoiding environmental responsibility. Some companies in the United States will move their production process to foreign countries with more relaxed environmental policies to avoid the pollution laws that exist in the US. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that "in countries with tight environmental regulation, companies have 29% lower domestic emissions on average. On the other hand, such a tightening in regulation results in 43% higher emissions abroad." The consequences of higher pollution rates are then attributed to the loose regulations in these countries, rather than on the companies themselves who purposefully moved into these areas to avoid strict pollution policy.
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Multi-task learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a subfield of machine learning in which multiple learning tasks are solved at the same time, while exploiting commonalities and differences across tasks. This can result in improved learning efficiency and prediction accuracy for the task-specific models, when compared to training the models separately. Inherently, Multi-task learning is a multi-objective optimization problem having trade-offs between different tasks. Early versions of MTL were called "hints". In a widely cited 1997 paper, Rich Caruana gave the following characterization:Multitask Learning is an approach to inductive transfer that improves generalization by using the domain information contained in the training signals of related tasks as an inductive bias. It does this by learning tasks in parallel while using a shared representation; what is learned for each task can help other tasks be learned better. In the classification context, MTL aims to improve the performance of multiple classification tasks by learning them jointly. One example is a spam-filter, which can be treated as distinct but related classification tasks across different users. To make this more concrete, consider that different people have different distributions of features which distinguish spam emails from legitimate ones, for example an English speaker may find that all emails in Russian are spam, not so for Russian speakers. Yet there is a definite commonality in this classification task across users, for example one common feature might be text related to money transfer. Solving each user's spam classification problem jointly via MTL can let the solutions inform each other and improve performance. Further examples of settings for MTL include multiclass classification and multi-label classification. Multi-task learning works because regularization induced by requiring an algorithm to perform well on a related task can be superior to regularization that prevents overfitting by penalizing all complexity uniformly. One situation where MTL may be particularly helpful is if the tasks share significant commonalities and are generally slightly under sampled. However, as discussed below, MTL has also been shown to be beneficial for learning unrelated tasks. == Methods == The key challenge in multi-task learning, is how to combine learning signals from multiple tasks into a single model. This may strongly depend on how well different task agree with each other, or contradict each other. There are several ways to address this challenge: === Task grouping and overlap === Within the MTL paradigm, information can be shared across some or all of the tasks. Depending on the structure of task relatedness, one may want to share information selectively across the tasks. For example, tasks may be grouped or exist in a hierarchy, or be related according to some general metric. Suppose, as developed more formally below, that the parameter vector modeling each task is a linear combination of some underlying basis. Similarity in terms of this basis can indicate the relatedness of the tasks. For example, with sparsity, overlap of nonzero coefficients across tasks indicates commonality. A task grouping then corresponds to those tasks lying in a subspace generated by some subset of basis elements, where tasks in different groups may be disjoint or overlap arbitrarily in terms of their bases. Task relatedness can be imposed a priori or learned from the data. Hierarchical task relatedness can also be exploited implicitly without assuming a priori knowledge or learning relations explicitly. For example, the explicit learning of sample relevance across tasks can be done to guarantee the effectiveness of joint learning across multiple domains. === Exploiting unrelated tasks: Auxiliary learning === In auxiliary learning, one attempts learning a group of principal tasks using a group of auxiliary tasks, unrelated to the principal ones. With the right unrelated tasks, joint learning of unrelated tasks which use the same input data have been shown to be beneficial, and provide significant improvement over standard MTL. The reason is that prior knowledge about task relatedness can lead to sparser and more informative representations for each task grouping, essentially by screening out idiosyncrasies of the data distribution. It has been proposed to build on a prior multitask methodology by favoring a shared low-dimensional representation within each task grouping, and imposing a penalty on tasks from different groups which encourages the two representations to be orthogonal. Learning with auxiliary unrelated tasks poses two major challenges: Finding useful auxiliary tasks and combining losses of all tasks in a useful way. Some methods can learn these from data together with the training process, and combine tasks efficiently. === Transfer of knowledge === Related to multi-task learning is the concept of knowledge transfer. Whereas traditional multi-task learning implies that a shared representation is developed concurrently across tasks, transfer of knowledge implies a sequentially shared representation. Large scale machine learning projects such as the deep convolutional neural network GoogLeNet, an image-based object classifier, can develop robust representations which may be useful to further algorithms learning related tasks. For example, the pre-trained model can be used as a feature extractor to perform pre-processing for another learning algorithm. Or the pre-trained model can be used to initialize a model with similar architecture which is then fine-tuned to learn a different classification task. === Multiple non-stationary tasks === Traditionally Multi-task learning and transfer of knowledge are applied to stationary learning settings. Their extension to non-stationary environments is termed Group online adaptive learning (GOAL). Sharing information could be particularly useful if learners operate in continuously changing environments, because a learner could benefit from previous experience of another learner to quickly adapt to their new environment. Such group-adaptive learning has numerous applications, from predicting financial time-series, through content recommendation systems, to visual understanding for adaptive autonomous agents. === Multi-task optimization === Multi-task optimization focuses on solving optimizing the whole process. The paradigm has been inspired by the well-established concepts of transfer learning and multi-task learning in predictive analytics. The key motivation behind multi-task optimization is that if optimization tasks are related to each other in terms of their optimal solutions or the general characteristics of their function landscapes, the search progress can be transferred to substantially accelerate the search on the other. The success of the paradigm is not necessarily limited to one-way knowledge transfers from simpler to more complex tasks. In practice an attempt is to intentionally solve a more difficult task that may unintentionally solve several smaller problems. There is a direct relationship between multitask optimization and multi-objective optimization. In some cases, the simultaneous training of seemingly related tasks may hinder performance compared to single-task models. Commonly, MTL models employ task-specific modules on top of a joint feature representation obtained using a shared module. Since this joint representation must capture useful features across all tasks, MTL may hinder individual task performance if the different tasks seek conflicting representation, i.e., the gradients of different tasks point to opposing directions or differ significantly in magnitude. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as negative transfer. To mitigate this issue, various MTL optimization methods have been proposed. It has been reported that meta-knowledge transfer could help avoid negative transfer.Besides, the per-task gradients are combined into a joint update direction through various aggregation algorithms or heuristics. There are several common approaches for multi-task optimization: Bayesian optimization, evolutionary computation, and approaches based on Game theory. ==== Multi-task Bayesian optimization ==== Multi-task Bayesian optimization is a modern model-based approach that leverages the concept of knowledge transfer to speed up the automatic hyperparameter optimization process of machine learning algorithms. The method builds a multi-task Gaussian process model on the data originating from different searches progressing in tandem. The captured inter-task dependencies are thereafter utilized to better inform the subsequent sampling of candidate solutions in respective search spaces. ==== Evolutionary multi-tasking ==== Evolutionary multi-tasking has been explored as a means of exploiting the implicit parallelism of population-based search algorithms to simultaneously progress multiple distinct optimization tasks. By mapping all task
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Singularity studies

Singularity studies is an interdisciplinary academic field which examines the idea of technological singularity — the hypothesised point at which artificial intelligence may surpass human intelligence, might be attained by artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and other technologies and sciences, and its social impacts. In this academic field, the study and research are conducted across a broad array of terrains such as information science, robotics, social informatics, economics, philosophy, and ethics. The primary aim of singularity studies is to gain an integrative understanding of the transformation of social systems occurring in tandem with the explosive evolution of AI and also the changes to be effected by such transformation in the view of humans, ethics, and legal systems. == History == An academic work on technological singurality has appeared in computer science, philosophy, sociology, and law since the early 1990s. Early discussions of an intelligence explosion were popularised by science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1993 and later systematised by futurist Ray Kurzweil. Since the 2010s, universities such as Oxford, Stanford, and Keio have established dedicated programmes, while peer-reviewed journals have begun to publish scenario analyses and policy studies. Ongoing debates question the predictive value of singularity scenarios and warn against a deterministic view of technology. == Characteristics of research == Singularity studies extends beyond mere future predictions and offer an intellectual foundation for proactively designing and creating a desirable future. Principal research themes in this realm include: Ethics of AI; Social implications of technologies; Possibility of harmonious coexistence of humans and AI; Communication with AI; and Redesign of social systems. == Technologists and academics == Vernor Vinge: Propounded the concept of singularity in 1993, making a massive impact on the academic and science-fiction spheres. Ray Kurzweil: Predicted the advent around 2045 of the technological singularity in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. Nick Bostrom: Offered philosophical reflections on superintelligence and the risks posed by AI. He is the founding director of the now-dissolved Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. === Japan === Kento Sasano: A social informatician, AI educator, and inventor. He is the president of the Japan Society of Singularity Studies. == Challenges and outlook == Singularity studies is still evolving as an academic field, and quite a few challenges remain unresolved in regard to the systematization of their theories, research methods, and educational curricula. That said, in this day and age of accelerating technological and societal shifts, interdisciplinary approaches have gained in importance and are drawing much attention in the arenas of scholarly research, intercorporate collaboration, and policy planning.
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Closest point method

The closest point method (CPM) is an embedding method for solving partial differential equations on surfaces. The closest point method uses standard numerical approaches such as finite differences, finite element or spectral methods in order to solve the embedding partial differential equation (PDE) which is equal to the original PDE on the surface. The solution is computed in a band surrounding the surface in order to be computationally efficient. In order to extend the data off the surface, the closest point method uses a closest point representation. This representation extends function values to be constant along directions normal to the surface. == Definitions == Closest Point function: Given a surface S , c p ( x ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {S}},cp(\mathbf {x} )} refers to a (possibly non-unique) point belonging to S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {S}}} , which is closest to x {\displaystyle \mathbf {x} } [SE]. Closest point extension: Let S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {S}}} , be a smooth surface in R d {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{d}} . The closest point extension of a function u : S → R {\displaystyle u:{\mathcal {S}}\rightarrow \mathbb {R} } , to a neighborhood Ω {\displaystyle \Omega } of S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {S}}} , is the function v : Ω → R {\displaystyle v:\Omega \rightarrow \mathbb {R} } , defined by v ( x ) = u ( c p ( x ) ) {\displaystyle v(\mathbf {x} )=u(cp(\mathbf {x} ))} . == Closest point method == Initialization consists of these steps [EW]: If it is not already given, a closest point representation of the surface is constructed. A computational domain is chosen. Typically this is a band around the surface. Replace surface gradients by standard gradients in R 3 {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}} . Solution is initialized by extending the initial surface data on to the computational domain using the closest point function. After initialization, alternate between the following two steps: Using the closest point function, extend the solution off the surface to the computational domain. Compute the solution to the embedding PDE on a Cartesian mesh in the computational domain for one time step. == Banding == The surface PDE is extended into R 3 {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}} however it is only necessary to solve this new PDE near the surface. Hence, we solve the PDE in a band surrounding the surface for efficient computational purposes. Ω c x : ‖ x − c p ( x ) ‖ 2 ≤ λ {\displaystyle \Omega _{c}{x:\|x-cp(x)\|_{2}\leq \lambda }} where λ {\displaystyle \lambda } is the bandwidth. == Example: Heat equation on a circle == Using initial profile u S ( θ , t ) = sin ⁡ ( θ ) {\displaystyle u_{S}(\theta ,t)=\sin(\theta )} leads to the solution u S ( θ , t ) = exp ⁡ ( − t ) sin ⁡ ( θ ) {\displaystyle u_{S}(\theta ,t)=\exp(-t)\sin(\theta )} for the heat equation. Forward Euler time-stepping is used with relation Δ t = 0.1 Δ x 2 {\displaystyle \Delta t=0.1\Delta x^{2}} and degree-four interpolation polynomials for the interpolations. Second-order centered differences are used for the spatial discretization. The CPM results in the expected second order error in the solution u {\displaystyle u} . == Applications == The closest point method can be applied to various PDEs on surfaces. Reaction–diffusion problems on point clouds [RD], eigenvalue problems [EV], and level set equations [LS] are a few examples.
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Maximum inner-product search

Maximum inner-product search (MIPS) is a search problem, with a corresponding class of search algorithms which attempt to maximise the inner product between a query and the data items to be retrieved. MIPS algorithms are used in a wide variety of big data applications, including recommendation algorithms and machine learning. Formally, for a database of vectors x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} defined over a set of labels S {\displaystyle S} in an inner product space with an inner product ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \cdot ,\cdot \rangle } defined on it, MIPS search can be defined as the problem of determining a r g m a x i ∈ S ⟨ x i , q ⟩ {\displaystyle {\underset {i\in S}{\operatorname {arg\,max} }}\ \langle x_{i},q\rangle } for a given query q {\displaystyle q} . Although there is an obvious linear-time implementation, it is generally too slow to be used on practical problems. However, efficient algorithms exist to speed up MIPS search. Under the assumption of all vectors in the set having constant norm, MIPS can be viewed as equivalent to a nearest neighbor search (NNS) problem in which maximizing the inner product is equivalent to minimizing the corresponding distance metric in the NNS problem. Like other forms of NNS, MIPS algorithms may be approximate or exact. MIPS search is used as part of DeepMind's RETRO algorithm.
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Wetware (brain)

Wetware is a term drawn from the computer-related idea of hardware or software, but applied to biological life forms. == Usage == The prefix "wet" is a reference to the water found in living creatures. Wetware is used to describe the elements equivalent to hardware and software found in a person, especially the central nervous system (CNS) and the human mind. The term wetware finds use in works of fiction, in scholarly publications and in popularizations. The "hardware" component of wetware concerns the bioelectric and biochemical properties of the CNS, specifically the brain. If the sequence of impulses traveling across the various neurons are thought of symbolically as software, then the physical neurons would be the hardware. The amalgamated interaction of this software and hardware is manifested through continuously changing physical connections, and chemical and electrical influences that spread across the body. The process by which the mind and brain interact to produce the collection of experiences that we define as self-awareness is in question. == History == Although the exact definition has shifted over time, the term Wetware and its fundamental reference to "the physical mind" has been around at least since the mid-1950s. Mostly used in relatively obscure articles and papers, it was not until the heyday of cyberpunk, however, that the term found broad adoption. Among the first uses of the term in popular culture was the Bruce Sterling novel Schismatrix (1985) and the Michael Swanwick novel Vacuum Flowers (1987). Rudy Rucker references the term in a number of books, including one entitled Wetware (1988): ... all sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns – the whole bio-cybernetic software of mind. Rucker did not use the word to simply mean a brain, nor in the human-resources sense of employees. He used wetware to stand for the data found in any biological system, analogous perhaps to the firmware that is found in a ROM chip. In Rucker's sense, a seed, a plant graft, an embryo, or a biological virus are all wetware. DNA, the immune system, and the evolved neural architecture of the brain are further examples of wetware in this sense. Rucker describes his conception in a 1992 compendium The Mondo 2000 User's Guide to the New Edge, which he quotes in a 2007 blog entry. Early cyber-guru Arthur Kroker used the term in his blog. With the term getting traction in trendsetting publications, it became a buzzword in the early 1990s. In 1991, Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink organized the Wetware Convention in Amsterdam, which was supposed to be an antidote to the "out-of-body" experiments conducted in high-tech laboratories, such as experiments in virtual reality. Timothy Leary, in an appendix to Info-Psychology originally written in 1975–76 and published in 1989, used the term wetware, writing that "psychedelic neuro-transmitters were the hot new technology for booting-up the 'wetware' of the brain". Another common reference is: "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." The numerical allusion is to a classic 1957 article by George A. Miller, The magical number 7 plus or minus two: some limits in our capacity for processing information, which later gave way to Miller's law.
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