Author: TheConversation

By Christine Nguyen, 2023 California Health Equity Fellow, University of Southern California In the past two decades, children have become more obese and have developed obesity at a younger age. A 2020 report found that 14.7 million children and adolescents in the United States live with obesity. Because obesity is a known risk factor for serious health problems, its rapid increase during the COVID-19 pandemic raised alarms. Without intervention, many obese adolescents will remain obese as adults. Even before adulthood, some children will have serious health problems beginning in their preteen years. To address these issues, in early 2023,...

By Walid Hejazi, Professor of International Business, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto; and Bernardo Blum, Associate Professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto With the current geopolitical challenges between China and the United States, as well as the ongoing supply chain issues affecting manufacturers and consumers, there has been much talk about moving global manufacturing out of China. But despite the talk, U.S.-China trade reached a record level in 2022, with no signs of any slowing in the near future. While former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger is credited with opening China to the West...

By Archon Fung, Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard Kennedy School; and Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard University Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways? Senator Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters. Altman did not elaborate, but he might have had something like this scenario in mind....

By Pawan Jain, Assistant Professor of Finance, West Virginia University Artificial Intelligence-powered tools, such as ChatGPT, have the potential to revolutionize the efficiency, effectiveness and speed of the work humans do. And this is true in financial markets as much as in sectors like health care, manufacturing and pretty much every other aspect of our lives. I have been researching financial markets and algorithmic trading for 14 years. While AI offers lots of benefits, the growing use of these technologies in financial markets also points to potential perils. A look at Wall Street’s past efforts to speed up trading...

By Saurabh Bagchi, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. But black box is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence. AI black boxes refer to AI systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user. You can feed them input and get output, but you cannot examine the system’s code or the logic that produced the output. Machine learning is...