Dear Commons Community,

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in New York where we had Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays (until the Giants moved to San Francisco), and Roger Maris, rooting for our home run kings was easy.  They had good days and soso days.  Hank Aaron playing in Atlanta was something else.  He seemed to have good days everyday at least on the baseball diamond. Hank Aaron ignored the bigots, despite an avalanche of vicious letters and threats when he approached Ruth’s record. His 755 home runs made him  the king of the diamond for the ages.  Aaron died yesterday at the age of 86. Below is his obituary courtesy of John Schulian of  The Daily Beast and the Associated Press.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Hank Aaron Dead at 83

It never took Hank Aaron long to circle the bases after he had hit another of the home runs that became both his signature and his burden. Even on that April night in 1974 when he smote his 715th to eclipse the Big Bam himself, Babe Ruth, as baseball’s all-time home-run king, it was business as usual. No bat flip, no schoolyard prancing, no pointing toward the heavens to suggest that a higher power had ordained this moment. That was how future generations would celebrate. Aaron, a product of a flintier time, kept his smile in his hip pocket.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ infielders reached out to touch history by shaking hands with him anyway. The unwritten code that said all friendship ceased with a game’s first pitch had fallen by the wayside. Then two college kids bolted out of the stands in Atlanta Stadium to flank Aaron as he neared third base, shouting congratulations and slapping him on the back until security corralled them.

Aaron said later they had startled him, that he wasn’t sure what they were going to do even though he was in the city that revered him as Hammering Hank of the Braves, a mortal lock for the Hall of Fame and the drawing card for a team that had abandoned Milwaukee for the New South. It was an elephant-in-the-room admission that ran counter to the excitement swirling around him. The 53,775 eyewitnesses packed into the ballpark were serenading him with hallelujahs and Vin Scully was on national TV waxing eloquent about a Black man’s triumph in a white man’s world. But there was one thing Aaron had learned along the way and that everybody else, no matter how well-intentioned, seemed to have forgotten: God doesn’t give with both hands.

Aaron may never have uttered those exact words, but he embraced the truth of them for the rest of a life that ended Friday morning at age 86. He was a realist through and through. One need look no further than his theory of hitting to grasp that: “You stand up there alone, and if you make a mistake, it’s your mistake. If you hit a home run, it’s your home run.” And yet he still couldn’t avoid being whiplashed by bigots who reacted as though he were hell-bent on desecrating a national treasure that bore a WHITES ONLY sign.

In one instant Aaron would be chatting amiably about the eight seasons he hit 40 or more homers, a feat that no one, not even the sainted Babe, could match; in the next, he would open a letter that began “Dear N—-r Henry.” Or a sportswriter would ask about the great Milwaukee Braves teams of the late ’50s, back when Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews shared the marquee with him, and then Aaron would see that some hate-twisted knuckle-dragger had written “How about some sickle cell anemia, Hank?”

Sad to say, but in a country where basing hatred on skin color is second nature to a chilling percentage of the population, such ugliness was odds-on to surface. If Aaron tried to steel himself for the inevitable deluge, he didn’t succeed. The bigots’ cruel words cut deep. The hate came from the South, but even more came from the North in a daily avalanche of 3,000 letters—politician numbers, celebrity numbers—that started burying Atlanta’s offices in 1973 once people realized he had Ruth’s record in his sights.

When he ignored the bigots, Aaron could enjoy how for the first time in his career, he was being regarded as a player for the ages, a worthy member of a dream outfield with Willie Mays, Ted Williams, and the ubiquitous Ruth. He didn’t always have to hit a home run to prove it, either. There was an afternoon in Chicago’s Wrigley Field five years earlier when Aaron lined a single off the ivy-shrouded wall that loosened bricks and might have decapitated the left fielder if he’d turned around to play the ricochet a millisecond later. Next inning, a Cub slashed a fast-sinking drive that looked like a sure double until Aaron glided over from his position in right field and backhanded it an inch off the grass.

The great ones almost always glide. The great ones also almost always hit the ball harder than anybody else. But Aaron read his hate mail too and kept it so he could read it again and again. “I read the letters because they remind me not to be surprised or hurt,” he said long after he had laid down his bat. “They remind me what people are really like.”

The baggage he carried now would stay with him the same way his .305 batting average and 755 homers in 23 big-league seasons did. He took it with him when he returned to Milwaukee to play his last two seasons with the new team in town, the Brewers, and when he went back to Atlanta to become an executive with the Braves. Most of the time he was the Hank Aaron people remembered—his pride balanced by natural grace—but when Pete Rose was named baseball’s top player of the ’70s, Aaron erupted. And he had every right to do so. Rose, great as he was at the art of piling up base hits, couldn’t match either the majesty of Aaron’s achievement or the travail that came with making history.

He was never as breathtakingly brilliant as Mays nor was he a swashbuckler a la Roberto Clemente. He was, rather, like a great actor who loses himself in the role he’s playing. But American taste doesn’t run to understated excellence, so Aaron knew the sting of indifference. Too bad that 20-odd years after he got past it, along came Barry Bonds to present him with a brand new set of problems.

Bonds was the game’s star of stars throughout the ’90s and into the aughts, the kind of player who inspired debates over who was better, him or Aaron. But Bonds never came close to matching Aaron for power until late in his career when he partook of the performance enhancing drugs that turned him into baseball’s premier wrecking ball. In 2001 he hit 73 homers, a total that would have inspired disbelief in the dustiest, most pitching-poor minor league. By the time he retired as the game’s most walked controversial figure since the Black Sox, he had amassed 762 homers. And there wasn’t anything Aaron could do about it.

Critics lobbied to bury to lobby Bonds’ statistics in asterisks—baseball’s version of the scarlet letter—but as time marched on, it seemed more fulfilling to tune out the PED static and think back to Aaron on that grand night in Atlanta as he rounded third base and headed for home, smiling at last. He ran into his mother’s embrace and his father watched in what had to be wonder, for surely this was beyond any dream he might have had for the son he named Henry. Why, when the boy was born, a Black man couldn’t play in the big leagues no matter how great he was. Now Hank Aaron reigned as the slugger who broke Babe Ruth’s record while the bigots who had tried to make his life a misery slinked away and hid in the shadows.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting this morning that the Kansas’ Board of Regents voted unanimously on Wednesday to create a process by which the state’s six public universities can more expeditiously suspend and fire employees, including tenured faculty members.

It’s an extreme move, Shane Bangerter, one of nine board members, acknowledged, but one that he felt was “absolutely necessary,” given how Covid-19 has depressed higher education’s finances. The temporary change, which will expire in December 2022, gives greater flexibility to university leaders, other regents argued.  As reported :

“It’s an extreme move, one regent acknowledged. But these are “extreme times.”

Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn, an associate professor of music at Wichita State University and president of its Faculty Senate, offered a different image. Approving the policy, he told the regents, is like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.

It’ll harm faculty morale, hamper recruiting, and basically suspend tenure for the time being, he said. He and other faculty observers said they worried that the temporary policy would later become permanent, undercutting faculty stability well into a post-Covid era.

While the regents said they appreciated Sternfeld-Dunn’s position, his arguments ultimately did not sway the final vote, which was unanimous in favor of the new policy.

One regent, Mark Hutton, found Sternfeld-Dunn’s assertion that the policy change would threaten tenure unconvincing.

“Handcuffing our ability to ensure financial strength in the name of tenure is counter to its purpose,” he said, “and I believe it degrades tenure down to nothing but a jobs-protection program, which I don’t think anybody wants.”

No one wants layoffs, Bangerter said during the meeting. But, he said, these are “extreme times.” He called attention to Gov. Laura Kelly’s proposed budget, which would deliver, according to The Topeka Capital-Journal, $33.4 million in cuts to the six state universities. That’s a 5.3-percent reduction in the state’s base appropriation for the University of Kansas, the flagship, and a 5.5-percent overall reduction for Kansas State University, the news outlet reported. (The governor’s budget is a starting point and will be negotiated in the Legislature.)

The University of Kansas already projects a $74.6-million shortfall for the 2022 fiscal year, which “will require us to eliminate programs and departments, reduce services, and implement furloughs and layoffs on a large scale,” the university’s chancellor, Douglas A. Girod, wrote in a recent letter to faculty and staff members, the Capital-Journal reported. Like many other institutions, Kansas universities have lost revenue during the pandemic. The text of the new policy singles out drops in program and university enrollment as a financial stressor.

Ultimately, said one regent, Cheryl Harrison-Lee, “we’re at a point where we must be lean. We must be efficient. And we must be effective.”

That argument did nothing to convince Lua Kamal Yuille, a professor of law and Faculty Senate president at the University of Kansas. “The way to relieve financial pressure isn’t to fire people,” whether faculty or staff, she told The Chronicle. Rather, it’s to advocate for better funding at the state and federal level.

Under previous board policy, a state university had to “formally recognize a financial exigency that required elimination of nontenured positions and operating expenditures,” the Kansas Reflector reported. Under those circumstances, an institution could reduce its tenured ranks.

Now, under the new policy, employees can be suspended or terminated even if a university has not declared financial exigency or begun that process. The policy does not specify how universities should go about making those reductions. Instead, each university’s chief executive officer needs to submit a plan to the board for carrying out the policy within 45 days. Such a framework may be based on factors such as “performance evaluations, teaching and research productivity, low service productivity, low enrollment, cost of operations, or reduction in revenues for specific departments or schools,” the policy says.

Mark Criley, a program officer at the American Association of University Professors, told The Chronicle that existing financial-exigency procedures are supposed to give faculty members an ample role in determining if that condition exists and whether there are less-drastic means of dealing with it than terminations. So it’s a concern, he said, if the Kansas policy cuts the faculty out of the equation.

Faculty observers worry that the temporary policy will later become permanent.

Criley was also concerned that affected employees would get short notice of employment changes stemming from the policy. Universities’ chief executive officers are required only to give no fewer than 30 days’ notice of a suspension or a termination, the policy says. For tenured faculty members, Criley said, the AAUP advocates no less than a year’s notice.

A suspended or terminated employee would have the right to appeal the decision. That appeal would be heard by the state’s Office of Administrative Hearings, and the burden of proof would be on the employee. That, too, troubled Criley. The AAUP says faculty members should be guaranteed a full hearing before a faculty committee, and the burden of proof should be on the administration.

Universities are not required to make use of the new policy. Four of the six state universities — Fort Hays State, Kansas State, Pittsburg State, and Wichita State — have said that they won’t, at least for now. Girod, the Kansas chancellor, announced that he’d asked the provost and executive vice chancellor to reach out to administrators, faculty, and staff across the university to determine “if and how this policy may enable us to address budget challenges while prioritizing our mission.” (Emporia State University did not immediately provide a comment for this article.)

Meanwhile, Kansas State will “continue to address budgetary issues through the shared-governance model under existing policies,” Jeffery B. Morris, vice president for communications and marketing, told The Chronicle in an email.

“We have no plan at this time to utilize this policy,” Tisa A. Mason, president of Fort Hays State, told the faculty in an email. “Our budgetary and strategic planning remains focused on increasing enrollment and identifying new efficiencies.”

Fort Hays also faces another layer of complexity: One bargaining unit’s contract addresses reductions in force. That, plus Mason’s stance, insulates the faculty from feeling the effects of the new policy, said Janett Naylor-Tincknell, a psychology professor and president of the local AAUP chapter.

How the policy interacts with any existing agreements will be determined on a case-by-case basis, a board spokesman told The Chronicle in an email. Universities would still have to meet “all existing contractual obligations,” he said.

Though Wichita State and other institutions have said they do not intend to use the new policy, Sternfeld-Dunn, the Faculty Senate president, said he worries about potential abuses of power at institutions that do make cuts in this way. He could see a future in which an outspoken faculty member is dismissed under the guise of budget woes, he said in a phone interview. The policy also exposes a university to all sorts of lawsuits from terminated employees, he said.

Yuille, the Faculty Senate president at the University of Kansas, said that because it is a member of the Association of American Universities, faculty members must produce strong scholarship. That is accomplished, she said, when a university is committed to offering “real, meaningful tenure.”

Instead, she said, the policy transforms every member of the university’s instructional faculty into “the precariat.”

Tough news for our colleagues in Kansas!

Tony

TIME's new cover: Day one https://t.co/VazxGDJzZf pic.twitter.com/R6jVrzXXZc

— TIME (@TIME) January 21, 2021

Dear Commons Community,

Time magazine has a video cover (see above) for the mess that Donald Trump left in the White House for incoming President Joe Biden.

It ain’t pretty!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nathan Grawe in his new book,  The Agile College (Johns Hopkins University Press), providess a series of enrollment projections through 2034.  His data (see below) are disaggregated between two- and four-year institutions, and the latter are further divided by U.S. News & World Report rankings (“elite” colleges are those among the top 50 colleges or universities; “national” colleges are ranked between 51 and 100; “regional” colleges are those ranked outside the top 100). The enrollment-demand projections are indexed to 2018.

As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and based on Grawe’s data, we should expect a national decline of approximately 10 percent in the enrollment pools for two-year and regional four-year colleges. These losses are amplified in the Midwest and Northeast. Because fertility since the Great Recession has fallen short of the replacement rate throughout the country, even the South and West can anticipate a reversal of rising enrollments in the mid-2020s. Still, past college-going patterns suggest a gentler path for more-selective colleges. The rising number of parents with college degrees suggests increasing interest in four-year colleges in general and selective ones in particular — a trend that offsets the downdraft of fertility decline but intensifies the weakness in demand for less-selective colleges.

The recent “Knocking at the College Door” report by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education echoes the persistent and widespread challenges posed by demographic change, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast. We can also begin to take stock of how colleges are responding to these challenges. The commission’s president, Demarée Michelau, has noted that while the challenges are real, they represent “an opportunity [to] be thinking about our student populations differently and serving them better.” It’s not too late to alter the grim projections above, but colleges must confront demographic change head-on.”

These are sobering projections.  Higher education policymakers and administrators will need to take heed and plan accordingly.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched Dr. Anthony Fauci speak with reporters at a White House press conference yesterday, during which he described it as “liberating” to be able to speak openly about science in the wake of Donald Trump’s departure from office. (see video clip above)

“The idea that you could get up here, talk about what you know … and let the science speak, that is a liberating feeling,” he said at the second daily press conference of the Biden administration, when asked about the comparison with his often tumultuous tenure working in the Trump administration.  As reported by CNN and Yahoo News.

“Trump often broke from the recommendations of his own scientific advisers and experts, overpromising on therapeutics like the drug hydroxychloroquine, forcing Fauci to either publicly contradict the president or remain silent.

While Fauci initially appeared alongside Trump regularly during White House coronavirus task force briefings, he was later sidelined after contradicting some of Trump’s false statements. Trump went on to criticize Fauci publicly, even disparaging him and other medical experts as “idiots” on a campaign call in the weeks leading up to the election.

Fauci, who has now advised seven different presidents, has previously avoided criticizing Trump personally, even if breaking with some of the previous president’s statements. Thursday, however, marked the first time he spoke openly about his disagreements with Trump.

“There were things that were said, regarding things like hydroxychloroquine … that really were uncomfortable because they were not based in scientific fact,” Fauci said.

“I take no pleasure at all at being in the position of contradicting the president,” Fauci added.

Another noticeable difference in the Biden White House, according to Fauci, is the ability to acknowledge when something is unknown. “One of the new things in this administration is: If you don’t know the answer, don’t guess,” Fauci said. He later added the new COVID-19 team would strive to “be completely transparent, open and honest … and to make everything we do based on science and evidence.”

Fauci’s return to the James Brady Briefing Room as a representative for the administration’s newly formed coronavirus response team follows Biden’s signing off on 10 COVID-related executive orders earlier in the day. Those orders build on prior promises to reopen most K-12 schools, ramp up the production of personal protective equipment and administer 100 million vaccine shots by the end of Biden’s first 100 days.

He declined to specify when Americans could go to their local pharmacy and receive the vaccine much like they could the flu vaccine, reversing course on an earlier prediction that the general public would be able to have such access in April 2021.

“In the spirit of not guessing, I really am not quite sure on when that will be,” he said when asked about the timeline for wide scale availability of the vaccine.

Biden’s new initiatives come as COVID-19 mutations have been identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Fauci said Thursday that the U.K. strain — which is believed to be twice as transmissible as the original version — is already in at least 20 U.S. states. Even more worrisome is the finding that the South African mutation appears to evade antibodies to the disease, making vaccines potentially less effective.

“We’re following very carefully the one in South Africa,” Fauci said, “which is a little bit more concerning, but nonetheless not something that we don’t think we can handle.”

Fauci noted that the South African variant has yet to be found in the U.S., but that inevitable spread bolstered the case for a robust vaccination campaign.

“It is all the more reason that we should be vaccinating as many people as we possibly can, because as long as the virus is out there replicating — viruses don’t mutate unless they replicate, and if you can suppress that by a very good vaccine campaign, then you could actually avoid this deleterious effect by the mutations.”

Fauci added that if the Biden administration was successful in ramping up its vaccination effort, the U.S. could achieve herd immunity by the summer of 2022.

“If we get 75-80 percent of the country vaccinated by the summer, I believe that by the fall, we’ll be approaching a degree of normality,” said Fauci.”

Thank God that Dr. Fauci is in the public eye again and can speak honestly about COVID-19.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michael Wooldridge has an essay (see below) in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education where he reviews the decades old differences between symbolic artificial intelligence modeled on the mind and neural networks modeled on the brain. Wooldridge’s essay provides a clear and lucid explanation of the two.

Important reading for anyone following AI development.

Tony  

———————————————————————-

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Artificial Intelligence Is a House Divided

Michael Wooldridge

January 20, 2021

The sun is shining on computer science right now, especially the subfield of artificial intelligence. Not a day goes by without the press breathlessly hailing some new miracle of intelligent machines. The leaders of the field are garlanded with honors, and seem to enjoy a status few academics have ever reached. Eye-watering amounts of money pour into AI, and new technology empires are being forged before our eyes. In 2014, DeepMind, a U.K. company with apparently no products, no customers, no obvious technology, and only about 50 employees, was acquired by Google for the reported sum of $600 million; today, DeepMind employs more than 1,000 people.

Given all this, along with the financial hard times that have hit so many other fields, AI, from the outside, must appear a happy ship. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how things could be rosier. But look a little closer, and you’ll see that all is not well in the field. AI is a broad church, and like many churches, it has schisms.

The fiercely controversial subject that has riven the field is perhaps the most basic question in AI: To achieve intelligent machines, should we model the mind or the brain? The former approach is known as symbolic AI, and it largely dominated the field for much of its 50-plus years of existence. The latter approach is called neural networks. For much of the field’s existence, neural nets were regarded as a poor cousin to symbolic AI at best and a dead end at worst. But the current triumphs of AI are based on dramatic advances in neural-network technology, and now it is symbolic AI that is on its back foot. Some neural-net researchers vocally proclaim symbolic AI to be a dead field, and the symbolic AI community is desperately seeking to find a role for their ideas in the new AI.

Tribalism and mindless dogma are not the way forward.

The field of AI was given its name by John McCarthy in 1956. The founder of Stanford University’s AI lab, McCarthy was the most influential and outspoken champion of the idea that the route to AI involved building machines that could reason. AI requires that we have computer programs that can compute the right thing to do at any given moment. In McCarthy’s view, computing the right thing to do would reduce to logical reasoning: An AI system, according to him, should deduce the correct course of action. (If this makes you think of a certain Mr. Spock, well, you are in good company.)

McCarthy’s version of AI is called symbolic AI because the reasoning involves manipulating expressions that are the mathematical equivalent of sentences. These expressions are made up of symbols that mean something in the real world. For example, a robot built according to the McCarthy model might use the symbol room451 to refer to your bedroom, and the symbol cleanUp to refer to the activity of cleaning. So when the robot decides to cleanUp(room451), we can immediately see what it is going to do: clean your bedroom.

There is lots to love about McCarthy’s dream. It is simple, elegant, and mathematically clean, and it is transparent. If we want to know why one of McCarthy’s robots cleaned your room, we can simply examine its reasoning. McCarthy’s dream of AI was at the rather extreme end of the symbolic AI spectrum — it was not even widely accepted in the symbolic AI community, many of whose members believed in slightly “weaker” (and more practical) versions of the dream. But his basic ideas formed the AI orthodoxy for 30 years, from the founding of the field through the late 1980s. And while symbolic AI is no longer center stage for academic programs today, it remains an active area of research.

AI excels in developing ideas that are beautiful in principle, but which simply don’t work in the real world, and symbolic AI is perhaps the canonical example of that phenomenon. There are many problems in making McCarthy’s vision a reality, but perhaps the most important is that while some problems are well suited to this version of AI (proving mathematical theorems, for example), it just doesn’t seem to work on many others. Symbolic AI has made only limited progress on problems that require perceiving and understanding the physical world. And it turns out that perceiving and understanding the physical world is a ubiquitous requirement for AI — you won’t get far in building a useful robot if it can’t understand what is around it. Knowing where you are and what is around you is by far the biggest obstacle standing in the way of the long-held dream of driverless cars.

By the late 1980s, the problems with the purest versions of symbolic AI caused it to drift out of favor. (McCarthy, a remarkable individual by any standards, never gave up on his dream: He remained committed to it right until his death in 2011 at the age of 84.)

A natural alternative to symbolic AI came to prominence: Instead of modeling high-level reasoning processes, why not instead model the brain? After all, brains are the only things that we know for certain can produce intelligent behavior. Why not start with them?

In AI, this approach is called neural networks. The name derives from neurons, the massively interconnected cell structures that appear in brains and nervous systems. Each neuron is an extremely simple information processing device. But when huge numbers of them are connected together in massive networks, they can produce the miracle that is human intelligence. Neural-net researchers build software versions of these networks, and while they aren’t literally trying to simulate brains, the idea is that their networks will learn to produce intelligent behavior, just as in humans.

Neural networks are actually a very old idea — they date from the 1940s, and the work of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who realized that the natural neural networks that appear in human and animal brains resembled certain electrical circuits. However, McCulloch and Pitts had no means to actually build the structures they hypothesized, and it was not until the 1960s that the idea began to take off.

Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychology professor, developed a model of neural networks that goes by the gloriously retro name of perceptrons — this was the first neural-network model to actually be built, and the model remains relevant today. But work in the nascent field was effectively snuffed out by the publication of a 1969 book, Perceptrons, by MIT professors Marvin Minsky and Seymour A. Papert, who were staunchly in favor of the symbolic approach. Their book drew attention to some theoretical limitations of Rosenblatt’s model, and it was taken to imply that neural models were fundamentally limited in what they could achieve. Rosenblatt died in a boating accident just two years later, and neural networks lost their most prominent champion. Research into neural networks went into abeyance for nearly two decades.

There is still palpable bitterness about Minsky and Papert’s book today. When the book came out, the church of AI was divided, and the two sides have never quite reconciled. When symbolic AI began its slow decline in the late 1980s, neural nets swung into favor for a decade, when new techniques for “training” neural nets were developed, and computers were at last powerful enough for neural nets big enough to do something useful. But the resurgence was short lived. By the end of the 1990s, neural nets were yet again in decline, having again hit the limits of what computers of the day could do. A decade later, however, the pendulum swung again, and this time the interest in neural networks was unprecedented.

Three ingredients came together to drive the new neural-network revolution. First were some scientific advances, called “deep learning” (basically, bigger and richer neural networks). Second, computer-processing power got cheap enough to make large neural networks affordable. Third, and just as important, was the availability of lots and lots of data: Neural networks are data hungry. And we are, of course, now in the era of “big data.”

The last decade has seen an unprecedented wave of success stories in AI, and it is these successes that have led to the current AI frenzy. In 2016, DeepMind famously demonstrated a Go-playing program that could reliably beat world-champion players. This fall, a DeepMind project called AlphaFold made a giant step forward in biology by better predicting protein structures (“‘It Will Change Everything,’” began a headline in Nature). Elsewhere, rapid progress has been made on driverless-car technology — last year, Waymo, Google’s driverless-car company, launched a completely driver-free taxi service in Phoenix.

Recognition for the leaders of the new AI came in 2018, when Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, three of the most prominent champions of neural networks, who had stuck with the technology throughout the lean years, were awarded the Turing Award — often described as the Nobel Prize for computing — which comes with $1 million in prize money. There could have been no clearer signal that, at last, neural networks had been accepted into the mainstream.

All these successes are predominantly the successes of deep learning. Symbolic AI has played a part in some of these — but strictly in a supporting role, never center stage.

While the media tend to generically apply the “AI” label to all recent advances, some members of the deep-learning community profoundly dislike it. They identify it with a long list of failed ideas that have characterized the history of AI, of which the symbolic AI project, they believe, is the most prominent, and most egregious.

The successes of deep learning this century are real and exciting and deserve to be celebrated and applauded. And those researchers that stuck with neural networks through the lean years deserve our admiration for their vision and determination in the face, at times, of ridicule or scorn from their academic peers. But it is easy to get overexcited by recent progress. Deep learning alone will not take us to the ultimate dream of AI. It is surely one of the key ingredients, but there will be many others — some of which we probably cannot imagine right now. For all the progress we have made, we will not achieve the dream soon — if we achieve it at all. There is, I believe, no silver bullet for AI. Neural networks and symbolic AI each succeed with different aspects of intelligent behavior. Tribalism and mindless dogma are not the way forward: We must consider each other’s ideas and learn from them. And to do this, we must first cast away the bitterness of ancient rivalries.

This essay is adapted from the book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence (Flatiron Press).

Michael Wooldridge

Michael Wooldridge is the head of the department of computer science at the University of Oxford. His new book is A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence (Flatiron Press).

Dear Commons Community,

One of the highlights at yesterday’s inauguration of President Joe Biden was Amanda Gorman’s recitation of a poem she wrote for the occasion.  Listen to her words in the video above and have courage.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched much of the inauguration of Joe Biden yesterday as our 46th President and all I can say is that our country is back.  After four years of the disgraceful Donald Trump, I felt very good about our nation and where it is heading. There were no encouragements to riot, incendiary language, or lying on the part of the country’s chief executive.  There were smiles, music, hymns, poetry, and reasonable promises that we are heading in a new and better direction.

We wish President Biden and Vice President Harris Godspeed!

Tony

Mitch McConnell

Dear Commons Community,

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell opened the Senate yesterday saying the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol was “fed lies” by the president and others in the deadly riot to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s election.

McConnell’s remarks are his most severe and public rebuke of outgoing President Donald Trump. The Republican leader vowed a “safe and successful” inauguration of Biden on Wednesday at the Capitol, which is under extremely tight security. As reported by the Associated Press.

“The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of a branch of the federal government.”

McConnell said:  “We’ll move forward.”

Trump’s last full day in office yesterday was  also the senators’ first day back since the deadly Capitol siege, an unparalleled time of transition as the Senate presses ahead to his impeachment trial and starts confirmation hearings on President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet.

Three new Democratic senators-elect are set to be sworn into office today shortly after Biden’s inauguration at the Capitol, which is under extreme security since the bloody pro-Trump riot. The new senators’ arrival will give the Democrats a most slim majority, a 50-50 divided Senate chamber, with the new vice president, Kamala Harris, swearing them in and serving as an eventual tie-breaking vote.

The start of the new session of Congress will force senators to come to terms with the post-Trump era, a transfer of power like almost none other in the nation’s history. Senators are returning to a Capitol shattered from the riot, but also a Senate ground to a halt by the lawmakers’ own extreme partisanship.

Republican senators, in particular, face a daunting choice of whether to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection, the first impeachment trial of a president no longer in office, in a break with the defeated president who continues to hold great sway over the party but whose future is uncertain. Senators are also being asked to start confirming Biden’s Cabinet nominees and consider passage of a sweeping new $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill.

In opening remarks at his confirmation hearing, Biden’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, vowed to get to the bottom of the “horrifying” attack on the Capitol.

Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that if confirmed he would do everything possible to ensure “the desecration of the building that stands as one of the three pillars of our democracy, and the terror felt by you, your colleagues, staff, and everyone present, will not happen again.”

Trump’s impeachment is forcing Republican senators to re-evaluate their relationship with the outgoing president who is charged with inciting a mob of supporters to storm the Capitol as Congress was counting the Electoral College votes to confirm Biden’s election. A protester died during the riot and a police officer died later of injuries; three other people involved died of medical emergencies.

The House impeached Trump last week on a sole charge, incitement of insurrection, making him the only president to be twice impeached. He had been impeached in 2019 over relations with Ukraine and was acquitted in 2020 by the Senate.

Three Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Alex Padilla of California, are to be sworn into office today.

Warnock and Ossoff defeated Republican incumbents in this month’s runoff elections. Padilla was tapped by California’s governor to fill the remainder of Harris’ Senate term.

The next several weeks will be a most interesting time in the Senate!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a somber ceremony (see video above) at the Lincoln Memorial last evening, President-elect Joe Biden asked the nation to remember the 400,000 victims who died of coronavirus during this past year.  He signaled that addressing the terrible toll of the pandemic would be at the very heart of his administration. Biden spoke his words as the sun set over the National Mall, casting a rosy glow in the twilight.

The President-elect told Americans he shared in their grief — with his own understanding deepened by the loss of his first wife and daughter in a car accident as a young man and the loss of his son Beau to cancer at the age of 46.

“It’s hard sometimes to remember, but that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation,” Biden said  before the 400 lights were illuminated along the edges of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, marking the more than 400,000 Americans who have died from Covid-19.

He and his wife, Jill Biden, watched in silence, alongside Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, as the reflections of the lights glimmered in the water.  Hundreds of towns, cities and communities across the country joined in the tribute, lighting up buildings from the Empire State Building in New York to the Space Needle in Seattle. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, delivered the invocation and gospel singer Yolanda Adams performed “Hallelujah” after Biden spoke.

Harris spoke briefly at the memorial, noting that “for many months, we have grieved by ourselves. Tonight, we grieve and begin healing together.”

“Though we may be physically separated, we, the American people, are united in spirit and my abiding hope, my abiding prayer, is that we emerge from this ordeal with a new wisdom: to cherish simple moments, to imagine new possibilities and to open our hearts just a little bit more to one another,” Harris said.

Amen!

Tony