What’s the holiday-shopping equivalent of a fake-news botnet? (Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Boston, Apr 2017, and Washington, D.C., Sep 2015) Software that buys popular toys and resells them “at inflated prices at third-party websites such as Amazon and eBay.” NPR angrily calls them “Grinch Bots.”

New research at USC’s Information Sciences Institute uses sensors, data, and AI to first  understand the causes of workplace stress and, ultimately, relieve it. We’ll be visiting ISI as part of the field trip for our March 2018 meeting, Designing and Doing (register here).

Google has opened up for public use its Colaboratory development tool. Of course, the company can afford to do this because its AutoML framework can already program machine learning software better than its own engineers can (Gourab De, San Francisco, Feb 2017; Pedro Domingos, Washington, D.C., May 2009).

U.S. cities are being ranked according to the likely impact of AI on jobs (Ian Stewart, Brooklyn, Jul 2016; John Markoff and Mike Hawley, San Francisco, Dec 2016; Andrew McAfee, Jersey City, Oct 2013).