EUREKA!

EUREKA!

NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH

New Normal

Water shortages expected.

Millions of people who depend on snow for their water face a potential crisis, according to a new study by doctoral candidate Alexander Gottlieb and geography professor Justin Mankin. Their research shows that temperature and precipitation changes shrank snowpacks significantly in 169 river basins in the Northern Hemisphere from 1981 to 2020. The sharpest declines were in the watersheds in the northeastern and southwestern United States, as well as Central and Eastern Europe. “Those are places where the train has already kind of left the station,” Gottlieb says.

Blasting Bias

Can we rid Al of stereotypes?

As people rely on artificial intelligence to help with decisions on everything from hiring to parole, the proliferation of harmful stereotypes in machine-learning language models poses significant problems. Computer science doctoral candidate Weicheng Ma and assistant computer science prof Soroush Vosoughi recently developed a method to detect some of the builtin demographic stereotypes, including on gender, race, religion, and socioeconomic status. They hope to prune some of the worst offenders from pretrained language models. Their framework remains a work in progress as the inner workings of ChatGPT remain under wraps and competition increases from new chatbots.

Nancy Schaeffler