Alan Mackworth

UPDATE: If you want to speak (in person or by phone) at tomorrow's important city council meeting – at which these proposed Vancouver budget cuts will be considered – you can sign up here (BUT NOTE: the deadline to sign up is 5:00pm today, Nov 11):
vancouver.ca/your-governm...

🧵...

AI Lies to You Because It Thinks That's What You Want AI is being trained to please users and, in doing so, is becoming indifferent to the truth.

more to be said here than could ever fit in such a short article but it covers some of it, and happy to get a few quotes in it (no paywall I think)
www.cnet.com/tech/service...

YouTube video by Amii Joelle Pineau, Beyond Bellman's Legacy - RLC 2025

Excellent talk by Joëlle Pineau at the Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC 2025) youtu.be/PZcaMKxljxc?...

Cover of AI text "Artificial Intelligence" by David Poole and Alan Mackworth. With a background image of neurons.

The 3rd edition of "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents" by @davpoole.bsky.social & @alanmackworth.bsky.social is freely available. artint.info
You can order a hardcopy of the book for 30% off and free shipping through mid-September: lnkd.in/gzbyUpKt Code: 102519 #AI

Reddit post on r/technology about young people and AI: "I recently heard about a teacher who instead of trying to circumvent students using AI, which is impossible, she made assignments by going "ask ChatGPT to write a report on this subject, and then research how and why it's wrong". Not only did the students discover that ChatGPT is extremely wrong a lot of the time, it also lead them to realise that they should not use it as a primary source".

This is one of the best ideas I've heard in ages.

If it had a body, it could test its theory with the experiment. Then it could debug its reasoning.

How Your Cheese-Powered Baby Trounces AI An O.G. AI Researcher on How Being Social and Cultural Makes us Intelligent--and Whether Machines Can Ever Learn Empathy

I was interviewed by the journalist Jessica Nordell for her newsletter. We discussed some deep questions related to AI touching on humanities, politics, & dualistic assumptions underlying the conception of "intelligence" in AI. I hope you will read it!

jessicanordell.substack.com/cp/166912581

Off-cycle faculty position in AI at Queen's University School of Computing!!

employment.cs.queensu.ca/2025/05/06/c...

The framing of the position is so that it opens the pool to both anyone who does research in an AI sub-field, or uses AI largely for their research (AI applied to X).

1/3

Revisiting this classic from Paul Cisek today-
"Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement"
link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
Fave figure: "conceptual taxonomy implicit in mainstream cognitive science" ––which the article proceeds to systematically undermine/dismantle

Trump says ‘highly unlikely’ U.S. ever uses military force to annex Canada U.S. President Donald Trump says it is 'highly unlikely' the United States would ever use military force to annex Canada.

Dear Democrats + American "friends"
Even when your president says it is "unlikely" that he will use military force against our country it still worthy of a resounding response.
Right?
But we hear crickets.
You might be okay with the end of the rule of law.
Not us.
www.ctvnews.ca/world/articl...

Prime Minister Mark Carney 🇨🇦
"Large American online platforms have become seas of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate in all its forms ... My government will act." #cdnpoli

Completely unacceptable.

US students. Looking to apply to graduate school? Had an offer rescinded recently? The University of British Columbia in Canada will re-open the application portal in some departments for US students from April 14-18.
Details: www.grad.ubc.ca/us-applicant...
#ubc #AcademicSky #PhDSky #ScienceSky

A screenshot of a google sheet, too complex to describe in full; see this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Gw9lxWhhTxjjTstyAKliwdy75VHXLtCDxCPFJhe5pPQ/edit?usp=sharing

Random #EduSky aside in dark times: I just learned that Russell & Norvig's dominant textbook for #AI survey courses has a challenger in Poole & Mackworth's book, which is much heavier on stochastic ML approaches than the former (as opposed to symbolic, logical ones).

I wonder who's winning... 🤔

I couldn't find a list of Artificial Intelligence Researcher in Canada who are on Blue Sky, but every day there are more and more coming over from the other place. So here's my Starter Pack for it!
Drop me a line in the responses to let me know who I'm missing.

go.bsky.app/3HYHS4r

@davpoole.bsky.social

X Threatens Our Democracy. Canada Should Ban It | The Tyee The risks of election interference, misinformation and attempts to support a US takeover are too great.

X Threatens Our Democracy. Canada Should Ban It
The risks of election interference, misinformation and attempts to support a US takeover are too great. #Canada #BanTwitter

thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025...

🇨🇦🇺🇦“I stand with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And I stand with the people of Ukraine,”

- Justin Trudeau
Prime Minister of Canada

AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research - AAAI The AAAI President has commissioned a study to explore and address potential long-term societal influences of AI research and development.

Who needs yet another report on The Future of AI Research aaai.org/about-aaai/p.... Well, you do! I was lucky to lead the Embodied AI theme. It was fun to step back and rethink the very idea of intelligence as action not just thinking. Dive into the report and let us know what you think.

AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research - AAAI The AAAI President has commissioned a study to explore and address potential long-term societal influences of AI research and development.

Today we published the report from the AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research. You can download it from here: aaai.org/about-aaai/p.... It's designed to be readable by a general audience. Enjoy!

An article from “La Presse”. à Montréal paper. Trudeau has a great historical opportunity… let us see if he takes it!
lp.ca/3wzha3?shari...

Congratulations Donald Trump, you have united all three of Canada’s largest political parties against you!

Ppl are talking about "picking up" scholars leaving the US bc of cutbacks, but that's not the right way to think about talent flows. Few USians will leave US; rather US will cease to be the unrivalled academic destination point. The play is for intl scholars who otherwise would have gone to US.

'Welcome to Sen̓áḵw': A sneak peek inside Canada's largest Indigenous-led housing development | CBC News CBC was recently offered a sneak peek of the building as part of a special live broadcast of The Early Edition on Friday, Feb. 7, which will also highlight the Squamish Nation's culture, community, an...

'Welcome to Sen̓áḵw': A sneak peek inside Canada's largest Indigenous-led housing development #BritishColumbia

CBC Vancouver’s The Early Edition was offered a tour of the building as part of a special live broadcast

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Canada: Looking Good By Comparison Since 1867 Unisex T-Shirt It's not great. It's just slightly better than the countries we hear a lot about. Yay? • 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester) • Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²) • Pr...

Seems like as good a day as any to link to this shirt in the Beaverton's merch store.

Here’s a plan. Add in NSF grants too.

What’s not to like about using constraints as prior knowledge? No tabula rasa!

Important work on learning Probabilistic Circuits showing how to incorporate domain knowledge as constraints

Canada's limit is $1,650 per party.

Plus a limit of $1,650 toward split between individual candidates.

For a total contribution limit of $3,300.

The limit increases modestly every year. in 2025, it will increase to a total contribution limit of $3,500.

When does generative AI qualify for fair use?

The late Suchir Balaji’s blog post on AI, copyright and fair use, reposted in his memory.

suchir.net/fair_use.html