U.S. Public and Private Higher Education
News releases, reports, statements and associated documents from public, private and community colleges in the U.S.
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Valdosta State University: Board of Regents Announces National Search for Next Chancellor
VALDOSTA, Georgia, Jan. 26 (TNSPer) -- Valdosta State University issued the following news release on Jan. 25:
Board of Regents Chairman Sachin Shailendra announced today the appointment of the Regents Search Advisory Group to help conduct a national search for the 14th chancellor of the University System of Georgia (USG).
The decision comes as Chancellor Steve Wrigley has announced plans to retire July 1, 2021, after 36 years in public service.
The Regents Search Advisory Group will work with the executive search firm of Parker Executive Search. While final details are being worked out, the
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VALDOSTA, Georgia, Jan. 26 (TNSPer) -- Valdosta State University issued the following news release on Jan. 25:
Board of Regents Chairman Sachin Shailendra announced today the appointment of the Regents Search Advisory Group to help conduct a national search for the 14th chancellor of the University System of Georgia (USG).
The decision comes as Chancellor Steve Wrigley has announced plans to retire July 1, 2021, after 36 years in public service.
The Regents Search Advisory Group will work with the executive search firm of Parker Executive Search. While final details are being worked out, theadvisory group will work with the firm to set a search process that includes stakeholder input such as listening sessions and a publicly accessible website.
USG is launching the website to provide updates on the search and allow all stakeholders and the public to comment. It will be linked to USG's homepage and can be found at http://www.usg.edu/chancellor_search/.
Members of the Regents Search Advisory Group are:
* Regent Kessel D. Stelling Jr., advisory group chairman
* Regent Sachin Shailendra, board chairman
* Regent Erin Hames
* Regent C. Everett Kennedy III
* Regent Neil L. Pruitt Jr.
* Regent Sarah-Elizabeth Langford Reed
* Regent Harold Reynolds
University of Kansas: Study Finds Overidentification Skews Online Job Reviews
LAWRENCE, Kansas, Jan. 26 (TNSJou) -- The University of Kansas issued the following news:
Corporate consultants have preached "aligning" oneself with one's workplace for decades. And a new study shows how far some have taken the notion, to the point they are quite willing to tell flattering lies about their organization to online review sites like Glassdoor.
A focus on "commitment" -- as opposed to "identification" -- that includes ethical behavior and takes a longer view could counteract this tendency, according to a paper published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. The paper's
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LAWRENCE, Kansas, Jan. 26 (TNSJou) -- The University of Kansas issued the following news:
Corporate consultants have preached "aligning" oneself with one's workplace for decades. And a new study shows how far some have taken the notion, to the point they are quite willing to tell flattering lies about their organization to online review sites like Glassdoor.
A focus on "commitment" -- as opposed to "identification" -- that includes ethical behavior and takes a longer view could counteract this tendency, according to a paper published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. The paper'sco-authors are Cameron Piercy, University of Kansas assistant professor of communication studies, and Caleb Carr of Illinois State University.
Likewise, review sites like Indeed could improve their accuracy by cautioning reviewers against this tendency toward "unethical pro-organizational behavior" (UPB), the authors wrote.
"This paper shows that people are willing to lie on behalf of their company in online reviews if they are highly identified, but that commitment to the long-term values and goals of the company may reduce that willingness to deceive in the reviews," Piercy said.
Piercy said statistics show workplace-review websites are exploding in popularity, but that reviews come in "a J-shaped distribution, where only extreme viewpoints dominate the reviews of any given organization."
"There are really disgruntled people and really happy people, and nobody in between really reviews their workplace," he said.
In their survey of about 300 respondents, Piercy and Carr tried to capture the differences between identification with and commitment to a company or entity.
"We have identification with the company, which is a sense of oneness or belonging," Piercy said. "When you talk about your workplace, do you say 'we,' or do you say 'they'? That subtle shift in language is one way that that identification manifests.
"The other way we measured it was commitment. So the questions included 'How long would you like to stay at your job?' 'How attached are you to your job?'
"Those two are really similar concepts, but they are meaningfully different, and we found that affects how people rate their company in online reviews."
Piercy said the authors extended previous studies on unethical pro-organizational behavior to the online-review space.
"If you really see your workplace as part of who you are, even if you don't like it, you might give it a positive review, anyway," he said. "And that's what we found in the paper: The more identified you were, the higher your review was. And then the way we teased out unethical behaviors was ... we asked people questions like 'If it would help your organization, would you exaggerate the truth to customers?' and 'Would you conceal information from the public that could be damaging to your organization?'
"My co-author questioned whether people would be truthful about that. But when we measured it, the responses show there are some people who are willing to lie, and there are some people who are not willing to lie on behalf of their company, and it relates exactly to those forms of attachment that I just described."
Unethical pro-organizational behavior is bad for companies, Piercy explained, due to what he called "the sinking ship problem."
"If you look in the organization-science literature, it's universally good; we want people to be identified," Piercy said. "We want them to care about their work, to internalize what they're doing. But it's also bad, because if the organization is going down and you just keep bailing water instead of abandoning ship, you will drown. So commitment captures that. It's a long-term focus on you and the organization succeeding. So we might say that if people at Enron had really been committed to Enron's success, they wouldn't have deceived the public the way they did in the first place. They would recognize that the lie has a long-term corrosive effect."
The paper concludes by spelling out implications for both businesses and job-review sites.
"What does it mean for these platforms," Piercy said, "knowing that they know about the J-shaped distribution problem? So we said, 'What if the review site said, "Think about the long-term success of the company" and "Think about the implications for people who might read these reviews?" Focus on the commitment side of things, not just identification.' If you primed people to think about the fact that others might be using these reviews to make a decision to apply to the company or to work there, they might give more honest answers.
"And then we say for managers there's a lot of evidence that shows the more ethical a company is in its practices, the better long-term success it has. So organizations should focus on healthy attachment -- balancing identity with commitment: We're strong because of what we do at work and in our community, and what's best for the company is not necessarily the easy decision."
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JOURNAL: Journal of Applied Communication Research - https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2020.1812692
University of California Santa Cruz: Energy Spent Avoiding Humans Linked to Smaller Home Ranges for Male Pumas
SANTA CRUZ, California, Jan. 26 (TNSJou) -- The University of California Santa Cruz campus issued the following news:
In the Santa Cruz mountains, pumas are top predators, patrolling a diverse landscape of forests, meadows, peaks, and valleys. But "mountain lion country" is also bordered by coastal cities to the west and Silicon Valley to the east, with major roadways and fringes of development reaching into wildlands. As a result, humans have become a major source of mortality and fear for these cats. UC Santa Cruz researchers have shown that pumas will go to great lengths to avoid human "super
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SANTA CRUZ, California, Jan. 26 (TNSJou) -- The University of California Santa Cruz campus issued the following news:
In the Santa Cruz mountains, pumas are top predators, patrolling a diverse landscape of forests, meadows, peaks, and valleys. But "mountain lion country" is also bordered by coastal cities to the west and Silicon Valley to the east, with major roadways and fringes of development reaching into wildlands. As a result, humans have become a major source of mortality and fear for these cats. UC Santa Cruz researchers have shown that pumas will go to great lengths to avoid human "superpredators," even bolting away from food at the sound of human voices.
And now, the research team's latest work shows that these types of avoidance behaviors take a serious toll on pumas. A new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that fear of humans causes mountain lions to increase their energy expenditures as they move through the landscape, and this can ultimately limit the size of the home ranges they're able to maintain. Researchers are concerned about the long term impacts this might have on pumas and the ecosystems they help to regulate.
"Mountain lions fear us, and that fear has all kinds of impacts on their behavior and ecology, and ultimately, potentially even their populations and conservation," said professor Chris Wilmers, the senior author on the paper.
Wilmers is principal investigator for the Santa Cruz Puma Project, through which he and colleagues have been studying local mountain lion populations for over a decade. Barry Nickel, director of UC Santa Cruz's Center for Integrated Spatial Research, led the most recent study, which relied on data from five adult female pumas and eight adult males that were outfitted with tracking collars as they roamed their natural habitats.
Calculating energy costs
Throughout the two-month study period, the collars that researchers placed on wild pumas recorded high-resolution GPS and accelerometer data, which Wilmers said worked "essentially like a Fitbit" to help the team estimate how many calories a mountain lion burned based on where, how far, and how fast the cat was moving. The ultimate goal was to integrate the energy cost of navigating physical terrain with the cost of avoiding humans to see how both factors affect use of habitats.
To assess the impacts of physical terrain, researchers compared topography with trends in the cats' movement data. This showed that less rugged terrain requires less energy for pumas to navigate, which may help to explain why mountain lions prefer habitats with easy-to-traverse valleys or ridges. And to get a sense for how fear of humans affected the cats, researchers also compared housing densities with collar tracking data.
This analysis showed that, in areas with higher housing densities, pumas were engaging in more energetically demanding movements, like stopping less and moving more quickly. Their movements were also much less efficient: instead of taking the shortest path to their destination, they took longer, meandering paths to navigate around perceived risks.
"Humans, as a risk factor, are actually increasing the energy an animal needs to traverse this landscape," Nickel explained. "And this is primarily through changes in their behavior as a means to avoid humans."
Fear takes a serious toll
The constant vigilance that cats used as they moved through human-dominated landscapes is incredibly energy intensive. Nickel and the research team estimate that, in otherwise identical terrain, pumas expend 13 percent more calories per five-minute period in habitats close to people than they would in remote wildland habitats.
As a result, researchers found that fear of humans had a greater impact than variations in terrain on the amount of energy it takes for mountain lions to move about their habitats. In fact, the effect of increasing housing density on energetic costs of movement was four to 10 times greater than the effect of increasing slope and ruggedness of the terrain.
That's a problem because researchers haven't observed a corresponding increase in calorie consumption from the cats, and the other most likely way pumas might compensate for increased energy costs in navigating their habitats would be to reduce the total size of their territories. This trend showed up very clearly in the tracking data.
Both males and females showed reduced size in their home ranges associated with overall increased energy costs of navigating the landscape, but males, in particular, were especially affected by housing density. Male pumas in habitats most dominated by humans had 78.8 percent smaller home ranges compared to those with the most remote habitats.
Human-induced risk has actually become the primary driver of male patterns of space use among pumas, according to the paper. Females didn't show this same trend, but the research team suspects males may be more vulnerable to human impacts because they typically have to establish larger home ranges to improve their odds of finding a mate.
Conservation implications
Overall, researchers are concerned that pressure to avoid humans may harm the health of local mountain lion populations.
"It constrains their space use, which could then affect other aspects of their ecology, like finding mates, finding food, competing with other males, or other natural interactions," Nickel said.
Because these cats are apex predators that help to control populations of prey--like deer and racoons--any impacts to puma populations have the potential to cascade out and affect other species. That makes mountain lions a key factor in the long term health of ecosystems across the Santa Cruz mountains.
The research team hopes this will motivate consideration of ways to reduce human impacts. Wilmers says one of the best strategies for helping pumas is to limit the amount of development that reaches into natural areas, so that these cats can have safe places to roam without fear.
"If we continue to develop California in the way we historically have, we're going to lose this species," Wilmers said. "But if we focus our development on making housing more dense in the areas where it already exists, like cities, then we stand a chance of keeping mountain lions with us well into the future."
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JOURNAL: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2004592118
Tarrant County College, Rep. Turner Co-Host Meeting on Education, Workforce Needs
FORT WORTH, Texas, Jan. 26 -- Tarrant County College issued the following news release:
In preparation for the State of Texas' 87th Legislative Session, Tarrant County College Southeast recently hosted State Representative Chris Turner, chairman of the Texas House Committee on Higher Education for an interactive session addressing the critical role community colleges play in meeting current and future workforce needs, as well as policy recommendations to support Texas students and their pursuits to complete credentials and enter the workforce.
Attendees included TCC Southeast President William
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FORT WORTH, Texas, Jan. 26 -- Tarrant County College issued the following news release:
In preparation for the State of Texas' 87th Legislative Session, Tarrant County College Southeast recently hosted State Representative Chris Turner, chairman of the Texas House Committee on Higher Education for an interactive session addressing the critical role community colleges play in meeting current and future workforce needs, as well as policy recommendations to support Texas students and their pursuits to complete credentials and enter the workforce.
Attendees included TCC Southeast President WilliamCoppola, TCC Chancellor Eugene Giovannini, JP Morgan Private Bank Market Manager David Nolet and TCC Southeast Cybersecurity Professor Charles Desassure. One of his cybersecurity students, Abdullah Khan, shared his perspectives on the acclaimed cybersecurity program and career opportunities in the region.
Rep. Turner is a longtime supporter of TCC and its mission. During the current legislative session in Austin, Turner and other state lawmakers are debating education-related funding for Tarrant County schools.
Educate Texas, Philanthropy Advocates and The Hunt Institute informed the content and direction of the conversation, representing TCC's commitment to serving the community and preparing students for in-demand careers of the future.
Watch highlights of the meeting: https://youtu.be/mZzM7Gs1Tx8
Northern Arizona University Doctoral Student Leads Paleoclimate Study of Precipitation and Sea Ice in Arctic Alaska
FLAGSTAFF, Arizona, Jan. 26 (TNSJou) -- Northern Arizona University issued the following news:
Arctic sea ice is rapidly diminishing due to global warming, and scientists have found that sea ice dynamics have a big impact on circulation and precipitation patterns in Arctic Alaska, which lies at a climatological crossroads between the Arctic and North Pacific oceans. Recent studies--most of which focus on current trends in the region and on what will happen in the future--have shown that circulation patterns in the Arctic and North Pacific oceans influence one another.
Northern Arizona University
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FLAGSTAFF, Arizona, Jan. 26 (TNSJou) -- Northern Arizona University issued the following news:
Arctic sea ice is rapidly diminishing due to global warming, and scientists have found that sea ice dynamics have a big impact on circulation and precipitation patterns in Arctic Alaska, which lies at a climatological crossroads between the Arctic and North Pacific oceans. Recent studies--most of which focus on current trends in the region and on what will happen in the future--have shown that circulation patterns in the Arctic and North Pacific oceans influence one another.
Northern Arizona Universitydoctoral candidate Ellie Broadman of Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability wanted to learn about this relationship on a longer timescale, so she developed and led a study in Arctic Alaska to investigate it. She is the lead author on a paper detailing her team's findings, "Coupled impacts of sea ice variability and North Pacific atmospheric circulation on Holocene hydroclimate in Arctic Alaska," which was recently published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team, which included NAU Regents' Professor and prominent paleoclimatologist Darrell Kaufman and four noted British scientists as collaborators, compiled a new record of hydroclimatic change in the past 10,000 years in Arctic Alaska, revealing that periods of reduced sea ice result in isotopically heavier precipitation derived from proximal Arctic moisture sources. The researchers supported their findings about this systematic relationship through isotope-enabled model simulations and a compilation of regional paleoclimate records.
"We developed a new paleoclimate dataset from a lake sediment core that was collected in Arctic Alaska," Broadman said. "That record extends back nearly 10,000 years, and we used it to understand precipitation patterns in the past. We combined that dataset with some model simulations and a bunch of previously published paleoclimate records and interpreted all those different puzzle pieces to try to get a sense of what was happening at a large scale."
"Using all these datasets, we showed that there's evidence for a relationship between sea ice in the Arctic and atmospheric circulation in the North Pacific in the past, and that those dynamics can make it wetter or drier in Arctic Alaska. Understanding these long-term dynamics are important for understanding what will happen in the future, because they give us an idea of how different parts of the climate system have responded to one another previously. They reveal some natural processes that are important to understand as we look at the impact of global warming."
Broadman was drawn to paleoclimate research while pursuing her undergraduate degree in geography, which she enjoyed because of its interdisciplinary nature.
"I loved thinking about the connections between natural and human systems. I started working in the paleoecology lab to get some research experience and got hooked. You can do so many things with mud! You can study the influence of humans on the environment, or how fire and vegetation changed over time, or look at really large-scale climate processes, like I did in this paper. And just like geography, paleoclimatology is so interdisciplinary; it draws people from all kinds of academic backgrounds, from anthropology, to ecology, to math and physics and beyond. I love working with people who have all these different backgrounds and interests. I also love learning about the Earth's climate system, and I wanted to become an expert in climate science. So, when I decided to go to graduate school, it was an easy decision to work in this interdisciplinary, climate-focused field."
Broadman chose NAU's PhD program in Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability for her graduate career. "The main reason I came to NAU was to work with Darrell Kaufman, my adviser. He has an incredible reputation; he does super interesting and important research and it was a major selling point that his research program is focused on Alaska. As someone interested in climate change, I was drawn to the Arctic. It feels exciting and extremely relevant to study a region where climate is changing faster than anywhere else on the planet. Getting to do field work in Alaska, and specifically in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, was a bonus."
"As I set out to earn my Ph.D., my goal was to contribute about the North Pacific, the Arctic, sea ice and how those processes work together to influence climate in Arctic Alaska. It's very satisfying to feel like I accomplished that goal, and I think it feeds the part of my brain that loves to think in terms of big, interconnected systems."
Broadman, who plans to graduate in April, is applying for a variety of positions. Her interests include policy, land management and science communications as well as teaching and research.
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JOURNAL: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - https://www.pnas.org/content/117/52/33034
Kansas Wesleyan University: Houk Named Director of Recruitment and Alumni and Parent Engagement
SALINA, Kansas, Jan. 26 (TNSPer) -- Kansas Wesleyan University issued the following news:
Kansas Wesleyan University has named alumna Claire Houk (Massey) '17 Director of Recruitment and Alumni and Parent Engagement, effective immediately.
Houk '17 enters her new role following several months as the Associate Director of Admissions. In her new position, she will assist with strategy regarding recruitment and admissions processes, as well as helping to manage the day-to-day processes in the admissions office. In addition, she will take the lead on many campus events, both virtual and on-ground
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SALINA, Kansas, Jan. 26 (TNSPer) -- Kansas Wesleyan University issued the following news:
Kansas Wesleyan University has named alumna Claire Houk (Massey) '17 Director of Recruitment and Alumni and Parent Engagement, effective immediately.
Houk '17 enters her new role following several months as the Associate Director of Admissions. In her new position, she will assist with strategy regarding recruitment and admissions processes, as well as helping to manage the day-to-day processes in the admissions office. In addition, she will take the lead on many campus events, both virtual and on-groundwhen possible, and will manage communications to alumni and parents.
"This position is an excellent fit for Claire," said Ken Oliver, vice president of Advancement, Admissions and Marketing. "She has excelled in her role within admissions and was a key driver in our increased enrollment in the fall. I expect that, moving forward, she will continue to perform at a high level and bring new ideas and vision to this position."
Houk graduated from KWU in 2017, when she was the recipient of the Professor Fran Jabara Leadership Award. While a student, she competed on the women's golf team, sang in the Philharmonic Choir and Wesleyan Chorale and was a member of the award-winning Alpha Chi honor society. She is currently enrolled in KWU's MBA program.
"I'm excited to take on this new position," said Houk. "As a Kansas Wesleyan alumna myself, it will be a pleasure to help foster relationships between fellow KWU graduates. I look forward to seeing the Coyote Pack continue to develop!"
Cornell: Chess Engine Sacrifices Mastery to Mimic Human Play
ITHACA, New York, Jan. 26 (TNSRes) -- Cornell University issued the following news:
When it comes to chess, computers seem to have nothing left to prove.
Since IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, advances in artificial intelligence have made chess-playing computers more and more formidable. No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years.
In new research, a team including Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, developed an artificially intelligent chess engine that doesn't necessarily seek to beat humans - it's trained
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ITHACA, New York, Jan. 26 (TNSRes) -- Cornell University issued the following news:
When it comes to chess, computers seem to have nothing left to prove.
Since IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, advances in artificial intelligence have made chess-playing computers more and more formidable. No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years.
In new research, a team including Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, developed an artificially intelligent chess engine that doesn't necessarily seek to beat humans - it's trainedto play like a human. This not only creates a more enjoyable chess-playing experience, it also sheds light on how computers make decisions differently from people, and how that could help humans learn to do better.
"Chess sits alongside virtuosic musical instrument playing and mathematical achievement as something humans study their whole lives and get really good at. And yet in chess, computers are in every possible sense better than we are at this point," Kleinberg said. "So chess becomes a place where we can try understanding human skill through the lens of super-intelligent AI."
Kleinberg is a co-author of "Aligning Superhuman AI With Human Behavior: Chess as a Model System," presented at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, held virtually in August. In December, the Maia chess engine, which grew out of the research, was released on the free online chess server lichess.org, where it was played more than 40,000 times in its first week. Agadmator, the most-subscribed chess channel on YouTube, talked about the project and played two live games against Maia.
"Current chess AIs don't have any conception of what mistakes people typically make at a particular ability level. They will tell you all the mistakes you made - all the situations in which you failed to play with machine-like precision - but they can't separate out what you should work on," said co-author Ashton Anderson, assistant professor at the University of Toronto. "Maia has algorithmically characterized which mistakes are typical of which levels, and therefore which mistakes people should work on and which mistakes they probably shouldn't, because they are still too difficult."
The paper's other co-authors are Reid McIlroy-Young, doctoral student at the University of Toronto, and Siddhartha Sen of Microsoft Research.
As artificial intelligence approaches or surpasses human abilities in a range of areas, researchers are exploring how to design AI systems with human collaboration in mind. In many fields, AI can inform or improve human work - for example, in interpreting the results of medical imaging - but algorithms approach problems very differently from humans, which makes learning from them difficult or, potentially, even dangerous.
In this project, the researchers sought to develop AI that reduced the disparities between human and algorithmic behavior by training the computer on the traces of individual human steps, rather than having it teach itself to successfully complete an entire task. Chess - with hundreds of millions of recorded moves by online players at every skill level - offered an ideal opportunity to train AI models to do just that.
"Chess been described as the `fruit fly' of AI research," Kleinberg said. "Just as geneticists often care less about the fruit fly itself than its role as a model organism, AI researchers love chess, because it's one of their model organisms. It's a self-contained world you can explore, and it illustrates many of the phenomena that we see in AI more broadly."
Training the AI model on individual human chess moves, rather than on the larger problem of winning a game, taught the computer to mimic human behavior. It also created a system that is more adjustable to different skill levels - a challenge for traditional AI.
Within each skill level, Maia matched human moves more than 50% of the time, with its accuracy growing as skill increases - a higher rate of accuracy than two popular chess engines, Stockfish and Leela. Maia was also able to capture what kinds of mistakes players at specific skill levels make, and when people reach a level of skill where they stop making them.
To develop Maia, the researchers customized Leela, an open-source system based on Deep Mind's AlphaZero program, that makes chess decisions with the same kinds of neural networks used to classify images or language. They trained different versions of Maia on games at different skill levels in order to create nine bots designed to play humans with ratings between 1100 and 1900 (ranging from the skill of more novice players to strong amateur players).
"Our model didn't train itself on the best move - it trained itself on what a human would do," Kleinberg said. "But we had to be very careful - you have to make sure it doesn't search the tree of possible moves too thoroughly, because that would make it too good. It has to just be laser-focused on predicting what a person would do next."
The research was supported in part by a Simons Investigator Award, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant, a MacArthur Foundation grant, a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant, a Microsoft Research Award and a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant.
