Media Coverage

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) has been busy in recent months, as it should be. The stakes are high when you look at the role artificial intelligence will play at nearly every level of national security in the years ahead. To underestimate the impact of AI on our nation’s safety and security is to do so at great risk. The biggest risk would be to neglect the recruitment, retention and training of elite human warfighters who will drive the successful deployment of AI. Like many in the fields of operations research, analytics, and data science, we have been closely following the work and recommendations of the NSCAI  with a keen and specific eye as veterans.

A new study by Yale SOM’s Edward Kaplan and Scott Rodilitz, based on data from a long-running survey of migrants who have returned from the United States to Mexico, estimates that the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is 19.6 million, far exceeding widely accepted estimates. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research, professor of public health, and professor of engineering; Rodilitz is a doctoral student in operations at Yale SOM. Their study appears in the journal Risk Analysis, the flagship publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

Machine learning can be an effective tool to set competitive prices. Artificial intelligence has its limits on how to set the most effective prices due to variables beyond the seller's control. Over the long term supracompetitive pricing can result. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are perfectly suited to help companies and marketers monitor and set prices based on real-time dynamic pricing. But new research has identified some possible unintended consequences of AI in this area. 

The race is on to curb the spread of Covid-19 and protect the health-care services in the United States from being overrun. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar announced today that the government will no longer hold vaccine stocks in reserve for Americans’ second doses. More vaccine supply seems like a good idea, but the decision is risky. Azar’s decision puts him in agreement with President-elect Joe Biden, who had already planned to release the stockpile after the Inauguration next week. The two vaccines authorized in the U.S. both require recipients to get a second shot within a few weeks of the first one, and Azar had previously said that due to concerns over manufacturing and the risk of undermining public confidence, it was better to to hold back half of the doses. That, apparently, has changed.

Every day, news broadcasts in Illinois and around the country report new COVID-19 cases and deaths. These broadcasts play out like a horror movie, with progressively worse outcomes each day and new records being set. At some point, most people become insensitive to all the bad numbers reported, except those like health care workers in the trenches treating COVID-19 patients, or morticians managing COVID-19 deaths. They need no news reports to tell them the state of COVID-19.