This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Pamela Samuelson, professor of Law and Information at UC Berkeley, discusses whether computer-generated texts and images fall under the copyright law. She says that early on, the consensus was that AI was just a tool, like a camera, so humans could claim copyright in machine-generated outputs to which they made contributions. Now the...

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Sergey Levine, associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, discusses AI reinforcement learning methods. Levine asks what it would take to create machine learning systems that can make decisions when faced with the full complexity and diversity of the real world, while still retaining the ability of...

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the UC, Berkeley, discusses what AI is and how it could be beneficial to civilization. Russell is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and the author, with Peter Norvig, of “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” the standard text in the field. His latest book, “Human...

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Michael Jordan, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Statistics at UC Berkeley, discusses the how to connect research in economics with computer science and statistics, with a long-term goal of providing a broader conceptual foundation for emerging real-world AI systems, and to upend received wisdom in the...

French anthropologist Philippe Descola examines the evolution of modern thinking about societies. He argues that the rooting of the descriptive tools of the social sciences in Enlightenment philosophy has blinded us to the fact that what are loosely called ‘societies’ are in fact, for extra-moderns, assemblages that, unlike ours, contain and associate much more than just humans, either because their institutions are able to integrate other-than-humans into collectives, or because...

Modern slavery, which encompasses 45 million people around the world, is intricately linked to the economy, politics, violence and war, gender and the environment. In this panel discussion, Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, talks about the impact of contemporary slavery with three UC Berkeley professors, Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita, Department of Sociology, Enrique Lopezlira, Ph.D., director,...

There are 45 million enslaved people in the world today. The links between slavery, conflict, environmental destruction, economics and consumption began to strengthen and evolve in the 20th century. The availability of people who might be enslaved dramatically increased in line with population growth. According to Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, the large and negative environmental impact of modern slavery...

As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in 1789, there was no experience, anywhere in the world, of a successful republican executive over an extensive nation — one with sufficient authority and independence to make things work on a national scale, but without the risk of becoming a monarch. This Jefferson Memorial Lecture shows how the delegates, and especially the Committee of Detail, went about constructing such an executive, and what it means for...

It has become commonplace that democracy in the United States faces an existential threat. This belief has gained popular currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, nourished by his conduct in office, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and continuing efforts to subvert the electoral process. Whether this is true only time will tell. But a common narrative among scholars of American government holds that representative democracy is failing more systematically than the Trump...

It has become commonplace that democracy in the United States faces an existential threat. This belief has gained popular currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, nourished by his conduct in office, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and continuing efforts to subvert the electoral process. Whether this is true only time will tell. But a common narrative among scholars of American government holds that representative democracy is failing more systematically than the Trump...

It has become commonplace that democracy in the United States faces an existential threat. This belief has gained popular currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, nourished by his conduct in office, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and continuing efforts to subvert the electoral process. Whether this is true only time will tell. But a common narrative among scholars of American government holds that representative democracy is failing more systematically than the Trump...

The world has lived through 2+ years of the COVID-19 pandemic, heightening the awareness of the links between health and other aspects of life including education and the economy. Future pandemics are a real risk but there are a number of other threats to human health and well-being as well. These include climate change, the rise of obesity, inverted population pyramids, inter-state conflict, rising inequalities, antimicrobial resistance. Counterbalancing these threats are the opportunities...

A hallmark of every developed nation is the provision of a social safety net – a collection of public programs that deliver aid to the poor. Because of their higher rates of poverty, children are often a major beneficiary of safety net programs. Compared to other countries, the U.S. spends less on antipoverty programs and, consequently, has higher child poverty rates. Professor Hilary Hoynes discusses the emerging research that examines how the social safety net affects children’s life...

Disability rights activist Judy Heumann has been fighting for inclusion for over six decades, in ways that transformed legal and societal understandings of equality. Her life-long experience has included co-founding the organization Disabled in Action, working on Capitol Hill to shape landmark disability rights laws, co-organizing the extraordinary protest and advocacy efforts that spurred the implementation of Section 504, and advising presidential administrations and the World Bank on...

The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) began in 1991 sponsored by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to fill a critical gap in global health information. It has grown steadily to become an active collaboration of more than 8,000 scientists, researchers and policy-makers from 156 countries working together to quantify health at the national and subnational level. In this program, Christopher J.L. Murray, Professor and Chair of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of...

Ukrainian Member of Parliament Inna Sovsun joins Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Janet Napolitano, Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and former Secretary of Homeland Security, for a firsthand perspective on the war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in early 2022. They discuss the war's impact, and what comes next for the people of Ukraine. This event is cosponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Center for Security in Politics,...

UC Berkeley Goldman School's new Center for Security in Politics hosts a fireside chat with former UC President and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano in conversation with Jose Antonio Meade. He served as a cabinet minister under Presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto in a variety of roles, including Secretary of Finance and Public Credit, Secretary of Social Development, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and Secretary of Energy. He was the Institutional Revolutionary...

Philosophy almost alone among disciplines appears to lack a distinctive subject matter. The world has chemical, biological and political aspects, but no philosophical aspects. If subject matter does have a role to play here, it’s to do less with the field’s descriptive ambitions than the genealogy of philosophical problems. MIT's professor of philosophy's Stephen Yablo’s interests are wide-ranging, from metaphysics, philosophical logic and epistemology, to the philosophy of language and the...

This program looks at education and how the brain of adolescents primes them for learning. Caroline Hoxby, professor of economics at Stanford University and one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of education economics, says investing in education in early adolescents can have profound impacts on the continuation of learning through teenage years and beyond. She says that more education leads to social cohesion, advancing economic opportunity, reducing inequality and decreasing...

One of the world’s leading scholars in the field of education economics, Caroline Hoxby’s lectures draw upon economics, neuroscience, and education. She shows that early adolescence is the point at which most people either join the path towards advanced cognitive skills or not. Hoxby argues that it is imperative to invest in early education. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Education] [Show ID: 38061]

One of the world’s leading scholars in the field of education economics, Caroline Hoxby’s lectures draw upon economics, neuroscience, and education. She shows that early adolescence is the point at which most people either join the path towards advanced cognitive skills or not. Hoxby argues that, in a highly industrialized economy like that of the United States, it is not unreasonable for people on the non-advanced-cognitive-skills path to exhibit “economic fatalism” — despair at their...

Kate Crawford, author of "Atlas AI: Power, Politics and Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence," is a leading international scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. This program looks at the intersection of art, activism and artificial intelligence. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 37967]

The last decade has seen a dramatic capture of digital material for machine learning production. This data is the basis for sense-making in AI, not as classical representations of the world with individual meaning, but as mass collections: ground truth for machine abstractions and operations. What happens when data is seen as an aggregate, stripped of context, meaning, and specificity? In what ways does training data limit what and how machine learning systems interpret the world? And most...

The International System of Units (the SI), the modern metric system, has recently undergone its most revolutionary change since its origins during the French Revolution. The nature of this revolution is that all of the base units of the SI are now defined by fixing values of natural constants. Our measurement system is now, both philosophically and practically, strongly quantum. Nobel Prize recipient William Phillips, Ph.D., a Distinguished University and College Park Professor of Physics...

Tilden Park’s Jewel Lake is home to a community of Western pond turtles, a species that is struggling to survive the combined threats of climate change, habitat loss and competition from red-eared slider turtles. Former UC Berkeley postdoctoral scholar Max Lambert is part of a team of wildlife experts who spent much of the pandemic checking in on the health of the Bay Area’s Western pond turtles, including those at Jewel Lake. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Agriculture] [Show ID: 37841]