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Talking Points

Woolf named a Presidential Innovation Fellow

President Barack Obama’s office has named computer science education pioneer Beverly Woolf a Presidential Innovation Fellow for 2013, recognizing her leadership in designing software tutors that respond to a student’s mood and personal learning pace, for example, to dramatically improve lesson effectiveness.
 
Woolf’s work combines artificial intelligence, computer network technology and multimedia features in digital tutoring software for teaching mathematics according to individual students’ needs. She attended a ceremony at the White House on June 21 to accept the award.
 
President

Survey shows widespread public opposition to ‘killer robots,’ support for new ban campaign

The results of a new campus survey show that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum oppose the outsourcing of lethal military and defense targeting decisions to machines. The opposition to autonomous weaponry is bipartisan, with the strongest opposition on the far left and far right, and among active and former members of the military.
 
A random sample of 1,000 Americans was asked how they felt about military technology that could take humans out of the loop altogether, dubbed “killer robots” by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international coalition of non-governmental

Trustees authorize tuition and fee increase if state funding increase falls short

Meeting in Lowell, the Board of Trustees on June 19 authorized President Robert L. Caret to raise tuition and fees by up to 4.9 percent for the coming academic year if the Legislature’s compromise budget does not include a $39 million funding increase for the five-campus system.
 
“Because the state budget has not been finalized, we find ourselves with the need to give President Caret the authority to raise tuition and fees if … and only if… state funding comes in at a figure lower than the $479 million proposed by the governor and already approved by the House,” said Board of Trustees

Visiting researchers use Geosciences lab to analyze sediment cores

Taking advantage of UMass Amherst’s investment in cutting-edge analytical equipment for geosciences research, several visiting geologists who collected the first subglacial sediment cores ever extracted from a lake deep below the west Antarctic ice sheet recently spent three days at the campus’s Hartshorn Quaternary Lab using two rare, state-of-the-art machines to analyze their hard-won samples.
 
Julie Brigham-Grette, associate department head in Geosciences, says UMass Amherst is one of only a handful of institutions in the United States with a Geotek machine that provides high-resolution,

Public sessions planned with candidates for chief information officer

Starting this week, public meetings with five candidates for the post of chief information officer (CIO) are being held for members of the campus community to meet and listen to the candidates and offer feedback to the search committee.
 
The five candidates were chosen by a 17-member search committee co-chaired by Michael F. Malone, vice chancellor for Research and Engagement and C. Marjorie Aelion, dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. The committee will make a final recommendation to the chancellor after the interview process is completed.

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