Yale University Alumni

"The newly developing “law of AI” has come to focus on risk regulation, and in many ways risk regulation seems like a good fit for regulating the development and growing uses of AI systems. AI harms tend to be systemic, occur at scale, raise causality challenges for potential litigators, and may not yet be vested (that is, they may constitute risks of future harm rather than current harm)—all challenges for traditional liability regimes."

"But as I argue in this paper, risk regulation also comes with what I call “policy baggage”: known problems that have emerged in other fields. Choosing to use risk regulation itself entails making a significant normative choice: to develop and use AI systems in the first place rather than adopt more precautionary approaches to AI. Risk regulation thus embodies what Jessica Eaglin has called a “techno-correctionist” tendency prevalent in scholarship on AI systems: the tendency to try to make technology “better” rather than to question the politics and appropriateness of its usage and to explore more systematically whether, given its harms, it should be used at all."

"Regulators should broaden their regulatory toolkit and move away from, or at least add to, the current narrow focus on AI impact assessments. If regulators want to truly address the harms caused by AI systems, they are going to have to do better than light-touch risk regulation."

"If you have 20 researchers interested in search, then getting them together where they are cross-fertilizing ideas, you make something bigger than its parts. You can create a nuclear reaction"

"We want to solve the problems that have been engendered by the success of search"

"I was like wishing I had a time machine, and I could go back to myself and like, punch myself in the face, actually. It wasn’t even like say no, it was like, physically remind myself that I didn’t like to do that."

"There are more tasks to do than there are time to do them."

"The idea that computers could be programmed to lead to intelligence, as in the robots in the science fiction I enjoyed."

"We want to produce well rounded data scientists."

"I discovered a love for designing and implementing processes the help people learn and perform, and for building effective teams to address complex problems."

"Early in my work on using computers to analyze authorship figuring out who wrote a document based on the wording and grammar."

"We are talking to people in industry who want to do adjunct teaching for some courses that are down to earth."

"I discovered a love of computing in high school, when personal computing was still fairly new the early 80s."

"I grew up as a science and math nerd."

"My colleagues and I looked at the classic case of Shakespeare we looked at a play for which scholars disputed whether Shakespeare or his contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote or if they each wrote different parts of it."

"Students coming in for a data scientist course are not looking for a real narrow technical focus but a broader in interdisciplinary approach."

"The breadth of the field, combining math, computing, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and more, is what has kept me in it for decades."

"I hope they will learn how important these skills can be."

"I recruited collaborators, led the development of a curriculum, and shepherded the proposal through a gauntlet of curriculum committees."

"I discovered a love of integrating the precise and mathematical in computing with the personal and meaningful in language."

"I fell in love with the field of artificial intelligence as an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon."

"I aimed at a research career and did my doctorate researching machine learning for mobile robots under the late brilliant Drew McDermott at Yale."

"I switched research directions towards natural language processing, using computers to understand human language."

"To our great surprise and excitement, our results showed unequivocally that Marlowe had written the entire play."

"They may still not understand it involves learning to talk with people who are not technical."

"I saw the growing interest in data science as a distinct field, and proposed to the Illinois Tech university leadership."

"Do the Indians have a soul? was the question. When Pope Paul III answered affirmatively in his bull Sublimis deus of 1537, he did so by conceiving of the indigenous people’s soul as an empty receptacle, an anima nullius, very much like the terra nullius."

"But if we really want to be the nation that leads the world in 21st century technologies, then we need a chairman — whoever that may be — who is willing to tackle the hardest of challenges and understands how to harness the power of competition, innovation, and investment to break through today’s bottlenecks."

"We are all paying too much for services that are both uncompetitive and second-class, and not enough Americans are being served adequately by reasonably priced, world-class services."

"I write what I am interested in, and hope it will find an audience. I don’t know that it would make a lot of sense to do it the other way around."

"Scholes mentioned and quoted from the “Following the Plot” essay, so the first thing I did was get my hands on a copy of The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism by Penelope Fitzgerald so I could read the essay in full. I guess mostly simply, I took Fitzgerald at her word. In that essay she says letters had arrived that dangled the possibility of an inheritance, and she decided to make the trip to Mexico to see about it. She and were quite desperate at that point, living beyond their means in London, editing a failing literary journal, with two young children and a third on the way. ... Penelope and Desmond stayed together until his death in 1976. Her first novel was written to entertain him as he declined. Despite all the problems, I think they must have loved each other deeply."

"Consider the as houseguest. Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything?"

"Follow your obsessions. It feels lonely and crazy sometimes, but if you believe in them other people will too, and you will create something enduring."

"Barry Strauss’ excellent The Trojan War using conventional chronology, warns the reader that ‘most dating is relative and approximate rather than absolute.’"

"Is there a way to translate the complexity into a narrative that has a kind of hook that will grab people?"

"One chilly morning last week, at a on the edge of , the Roca brothers came in from the cold. They were visiting New York on a twenty-four-hour furlough from , their dining establishment in northeast Spain, which, according to a list issued annually by the ..., is currently the best on the planet. Joan (head chef), Josep (sommelier), and Jordi (desserts) were dressed in dark parkas that did not look quite up to the weather. The plan had been to visit the Greenmarket across the street, but they were hesitating. “It’s cold in Spain this time of year,” Jordi said, nibbling nonjudgmentally on a Pret croissant. “But not like this.”"

"In July, 2008, was stripped of its license. n officials then granted exploration permits for half of the deposit to a much smaller company: is, by some estimates, the richest man in Israel; according to , his personal fortune amounts to some nine billion dollars. Steinmetz, who made his name in the trade, hardly ever speaks to the press, and the corporate structures of his various enterprises are so convoluted that it is difficult to assess the extent of his holdings. The was a surprising addition to Steinmetz’s portfolio, because B.S.G.R. had no experience exporting . A mining executive in Guinea told me, “Diamonds you can carry away from the mine in your pocket. With iron ore, you need infrastructure that can last decades.”"

"We are talking about stemming the near-term crisis, but what we really need to do is put Puerto Rico back on the path towards growth."

"Puerto Rico's debt is unusually complex, with 18 different but interrelated issuers. There are an even larger number of creditor groups with conflicting interests."

"Not long after , authorities in released decades-old documents about the death of her brother. The original police reports—several dozen yellowed pages, some covered in handwritten jottings, some of them typed—contain revelations that call into question the 1987 state-police report that declared the killing an accident."

"Jefferson had served as America's minister to France between 1785 and the outbreak of the French Revolution and had developed a fascination with . Upon his return to America, he continued to order large quantities of for himself and for George Washington and stipulated in one 1790 letter that there respective shipments should be marked with their initials. During his firs term as president, Jefferson spent $7,500—roughly $120,000 in today's currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America's first great wine connoisseur. (He might also have been America's first great wine bore. "There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines," John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. "Not every edifying.")"

"There is a palpable sense of fear and a justifiable expectation on the part of our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico that we, collectively…will act as we have have always acted when there is a crisis that affects Americans, which is to do what's necessary to stem the crisis, to protect the people, and to allow the economy to continue on the path toward growth."

"The markets are telling us what we already know - that the debts are unsustainable."

"A special legislative act is required tailored to the territories…Puerto Rico today, because of its status as a territory…has a completely different relationship with the federal government than any city or any state, and this affects its funding, this affects the rule of law that is in place, and we say that Puerto Rico deserves the tools it needs to restructure its debt...It's emergency legislation to deal with an emergency situation."

"For the commonwealth, with its self-governing status, it is our strong belief that any oversight must…leave the self-governance in place."

"Beyond repaying the debt, there's a whole set of initiatives that is critical. The economy needs greater investment…the gross inequities of Puerto Ricans in the healthcare system need to be remedied."

"We are talking about a..financial crisis in unprecedented terms both in scale and complexity."

"It has now become a sinister commonplace in the life of the post-war generation that man has never had any hesitation in applying his increasing mechanical power to the destruction of his own kind. The World War has now demonstrated the appalling possibilities of man's mechanical power of destruction. The only force that can successfully oppose it is the human conscience – something which the younger generation is accustomed to regard as a fixed group of outworn scruples. Everyone knows that man's amazing mechanical power is the product of a long evolution, but it is not commonly realized that this is also true of the social force which we call conscience – although with this important difference: as the oldest known implement-making creature man has been fashioning destructive weapons for possibly a million years, whereas conscience emerged as a social force less than five thousand years ago. One development has far outrun the other; because one is old, while the other has hardly begun and still has infinite possibilities before it. May we not consciously set our hands to the task of further developing this new-born conscience until it becomes a manifestation of good will, strong enough to throttle the surviving savage in us? That task should surely be far less difficult than the one our savage ancestors actually achieved: the creation of a conscience in a world where, in the beginning, none existed."

"[T]he eastern Mediterranean region...lies in the midst of the vast desert plateau, which, beginning at the Atlantic, extends eastward across the entire northern end of Africa, and continuing beyond the depression of the Red Sea, passes northeastward, with some interruptions, far into the heart of Asia. Approaching it, the one from the south and the other from the north, two great river valleys traverse this desert; in Asia, the Tigro-Euphrates valley; in Africa that of the Nile. It is in these two valleys that the career of man may be traced from the rise of European civilization back to a remoter age than anywhere else on earth; and it is from these two cradles of the human race that the influences which emanated from their highly developed but differing cultures, can now be more and more clearly traced as we discern them converging upon the early civilization of Asia Minor and southern Europe."

"[T]he past was supreme; the priest who cherished it lived in a realm of shadows, and for the contemporary world he had no vital meaning. Likewise in Babylon the same retrospective spirit was now the dominant characteristic of the reviving empire of Nebuchadrezzar. The world was already growing old, and everywhere men were fondly dwelling on her faraway youth."