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Throughout the entire time that President Barack Obama was in office, First Lady Michelle Obama had quite the impact on fashion.

Jackie Kennedy may have popularized pillbox hats and capes, but David Yermak of the Harvard Business Review points out that only Michelle Obama was actually able to move markets with her fashion choices.

The stock price gains of the companies whose clothes she wore in public appearances29 brands in allare cumulative abnormal returns. That is, the returns cannot be attributed to normal market variations, he wrote. Some companies that sell clothes that Obama frequently wears, such as Saks, have realized long-term gains.

Further, according to the Harvard Business Review, Michelle Obamas effect on the market is based on a two-fold observation. One, she wasnt paid to wear designers and observers can therefore put more trust into her tacit endorsement than, say, in a fashion spreads tacit endorsement. And two, Mrs. Obama doesnt just wear unaffordable haute couture. Rather, she pairs couture pieces with prt--porter pieces (like, for instance, from J. Crew), which makes it more accessible to the average consumer.

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Inside The Estimate That Says Michelle Obama Drove $2.7B To The Retail Sector And Grew Company Stocks By 2.3 Percent - AfroTech

Happy Thursday and welcome to a late-in-the-day roundup of notable news items. Below are a few need-to know stories as we head into the first weekend of June

The Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine has announced an international design competition calling on architects and design teams to submit qualifications for a 60,000-square-foot expansion of the museums current footprint, which comprises several historic buildings in downtown Portland. Over the last decade the cultural institution has seen record attendance and is looking to double the size of its campus to house new collections, exhibitions event and performance venues, and office space, as well as a rooftop restaurant and sculpture garden.

We are excited to invite experts from around the world to internalize the goals of The PMA Blueprint and turn them into physical spaces that bring them to life, said Mark Bessire, the Judy and Leonard Lauder Director of the Portland Museum of Art. This is no easy task, as our communities have made their expectations clear for open and innovative spaces that enable a flexible range of programs, exhibitions, and art. Beyond that, architects must understand the unique characteristics of Portland and of Maine, while displaying enthusiasm and reverence for this projects long-term impact.

The competition will be carried out in two phases with the winning team and design proposal unveiled in December 2022 and plans to open its doors to the public in 2026.

Grand Rapids, Michigan-based office furniture heavyweight Steelcase and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation have teamed up to launch the Frank Lloyd Wright Racine Collection. Using the Foundations archives and Wrights seminal design principles, the series will include chairs, desks, textiles, and wallcoverings, all of which reinterpret Wrights vision with updates for modern comfort. Steelcase has a longstanding working relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright that began in 1939 when the company fabricated original designs for the SC Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin.

The Foundation is delighted to work alongside Steelcase in carrying Wrights legacy forward, said Stuart Graff, president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. While people know Wright for his work in architecture, his passion for creating equitable, inspiring work environments was visionary. We are proud to partner with an organization like Steelcase that shares these values with the Foundation, helping to inspire designers, managers, and associates through Wrights ideas, which have only become more relevant over time.

The collection will be on show at NeoCon in Chicago June 1315.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama is slated to speak in a moderated conversation during the closing session of the 2022 AIA Conference on Architecture. The event will take place in Chicago at the McCormick Place Convention Center on June 24. This is not the first time an Obama has made an appearance on the AIA stage; in 2017, Michelle Obama spoke on equality and diversity in the design industry at the event.

Other scheduled headlining speakers include AIA EVP/CEO Lakisha Ann Woods in conversation with Madame Architect founder Julia Gamolina, and Jeanne Gang, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Rene Cheng and Jeanne Gang in conversation with photographer and architecture critic Lee Bay. A full list of speakers can be found here.

The 2022 AIA Conference will span four days running from June 22 to 25.

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Fund heralded the first class of its Women of Color Licensure Advancement Program. The program, launched in February 2022, supports women of color practicing landscape architecture, providing mentoring and assistance with navigating the licensure process. It derives from the ASLAs 2020 Racial Equity Action Plan.

The inaugural class comprises 10 women who identify as African American, Latin, Asian, and Native Hawaiian, the most statistically underrepresented groups in the landscape architecture field. They hail from across the United States, including Hawaii, California, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Florida.

Each woman will receive a scholarship of up to $3,500 to cover costs of the Landscape Architectural Registration Exam (LARE), along with exam preparation courses, resources, and mentoring from a licensed landscape architect.

Leaders at Buc-ees are breaking ground next week on a store thats set to be tied for the Texas-based rest stop chains largest location.

The Johnstown, Colorado center at 5201 Nugget Road will be Buc-ees first store in the state. Like other Buc-ees, it will be heavily beaver-themed, and serve food favorites including Texas barbecque, homemade fudge, kolaches, Beaver nuggets, jerky and fresh pastries. Patrons driving between Denver and Fort Collins will get to enjoy the worlds cleanest bathrooms, as well.

With 115 fueling stations and 74,000 square feet of interior space, the Johnstown store will be the same size as a location under construction in Sevierville, Tennessee. When the latter is complete, it will take the crown as the worlds largest travel center. (For motor vehicles, at least. Airports apparently dont count.) The groundbreaking is set for June 7, 2022.

H/t to GlobeNewswire

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Daily digest: Obama to speak at AIA Conference on Architecture 2022, the Portland Museum of Art launches expansion competition, and more - The...

Sen. Eric Lessers Obama-era colleagues are getting back together Tuesday evening for a virtual fundraiser in support of the state lawmakers bid for lieutenant governor, an event Lesser described as getting the band back together.

The gathering of Lessers former White House and campaign bosses comes as his campaign has raised over $648,000 between January and the end of May for a total of $1.07 million in cash on hand, according to the states Office of Campaign and Political Finance.

On the ticket for Tuesday evening: former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, David Axelrod; former economic policy advisor Austan Goolsbee; former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Alyssa Mastromonaco; and former Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe.

Lesser said he has turned to the group for advice on state policy and during campaigns for state Senate and lieutenant governor. Lesser said he looked to Goolsbee for guidance as his legislative team helped craft a COVID-19 recovery bill earlier in the pandemic.

Austan, who is one of the most well-regarded economists in the country, actually helped and did a call with my team when we were writing that legislation, Lesser told MassLive. Its an inspiring team that, frankly, helped change the world with the election of Barack Obama. So really, really excited to get everybody back together.

Following his time at Harvard, Lesser joined Obamas 2008 presidential campaign where he traveled across the country during the primary and general elections. The senator then joined Obamas White House staff, first as a special assistant to Axelrod and later at the White House Council of Economic Advisors.

A clearer picture of the lieutenant governors race is set to emerge later this week at the Democratic Partys convention in Worcester where candidates must secure the support of 15 percent of delegates to make the ballot.

Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll raised $259,087 through the end of May, Bret Bero hauled in $234,850, Rep. Tami Gouveia raised $159,089, and Sen. Adam Hinds raised $126,730, according to the states campaign finance office.

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Sen. Eric Lesser is getting the Obama-era gang back together for virtual fundraiser - MassLive.com

Last month, DeepMind, a subsidiary of technology giant Alphabet, set Silicon Valley abuzz when it announced Gato, perhaps the most versatile artificial intelligence model in existence. Billed as a generalist agent, Gato can perform over 600 different tasks. It can drive a robot, caption images, identify objects in pictures, and more. It is probably the most advanced AI system on the planet that isnt dedicated to a singular function. And, to some computing experts, it is evidence that the industry is on the verge of reaching a long-awaited, much-hyped milestone: Artificial General Intelligence.

Unlike ordinary AI, Artificial General Intelligence wouldnt require giant troves of data to learn a task. Whereas ordinary artificial intelligence has to be pre-trained or programmed to solve a specific set of problems, a general intelligence can learn through intuition and experience.

An AGI would in theory be capable of learning anything that a human can, if given the same access to information. Basically, if you put an AGI on a chip and then put that chip into a robot, the robot could learn to play tennis the same way you or I do: by swinging a racket around and getting a feel for the game. That doesnt necessarily mean the robot would be sentient or capable of cognition. It wouldnt have thoughts or emotions, itd just be really good at learning to do new tasks without human aid.

This would be huge for humanity. Think about everything you could accomplish if you had a machine with the intellectual capacity of a human and the loyalty of a trusted canine companion a machine that could be physically adapted to suit any purpose. Thats the promise of AGI. Its C-3PO without the emotions, Lt. Commander Data without the curiosity, and Rosey the Robot without the personality. In the hands of the right developers, it could epitomize the idea of human-centered AI.

But how close, really, is the dream of AGI? And does Gato actually move us closer to it?

For a certain group of scientists and developers (Ill call this group the Scaling-Uber-Alles crowd, adopting a term coined by world-renowned AI expert Gary Marcus) Gato and similar systems based on transformer models of deep learning have already given us the blueprint for building AGI. Essentially, these transformers use humongous databases and billions or trillions of adjustable parameters to predict what will happen next in a sequence.

The Scaling-Uber-Alles crowd, which includes notable names such as OpenAIs Ilya Sutskever and the University of Texas at Austins Alex Dimakis, believes that transformers will inevitably lead to AGI; all that remains is to make them bigger and faster. As Nando de Freitas, a member of the team that created Gato, recently tweeted: Its all about scale now! The Game is Over! Its about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory De Freitas and company understand that theyll have to create new algorithms and architectures to support this growth, but they also seem to believe that an AGI will emerge on its own if we keep making models like Gato bigger.

Call me old-fashioned, but when a developer tells me their plan is to wait for an AGI to magically emerge from the miasma of big data like a mudfish from primordial soup, I tend to think theyre skipping a few steps. Apparently, Im not alone. A host of pundits and scientists, including Marcus, have argued that something fundamental is missing from the grandiose plans to build Gato-like AI into full-fledged generally intelligent machines.

If you put an AGI on a chip and then put that chip into a robot, the robot could learn to play tennis the same way you or I do: by swinging a racket around and getting a feel for the game.

I recently explained my thinking in a trilogy of essays for The Next Webs Neural vertical, where Im an editor. In short, a key premise of AGI is that it should be able to obtain its own data. But deep learning models, such as transformer AIs, are little more than machines designed to make inferences relative to the databases that have already been supplied to them. Theyre librarians and, as such, they are only as good as their training libraries.

A general intelligence could theoretically figure things out even if it had a tiny database. It would intuit the methodology to accomplish its task based on nothing more than its ability to choose which external data was and wasnt important, like a human deciding where to place their attention.

Gato is cool and theres nothing quite like it. But, essentially, it is a clever package that arguably presents the illusion of a general AI through the expert use of big data. Its giant database, for example, probably contains datasets built on the entire contents of websites such as Reddit and Wikipedia. Its amazing that humans have managed to do so much with simple algorithms just by forcing them to parse more data.

In fact, Gato is such an impressive way to fake general intelligence, it makes me wonder if we might be barking up the wrong tree. Many of the tasks Gato is capable of today were once believed to be something only an AGI could do. It feels like the more we accomplish with regular AI, the harder the challenge of building a general agent appears to be.

Call me old fashioned, but when a developer tells me their plan is to wait for an AGI to magically emerge from the miasma of big data like a mudfish from primordial soup, I tend to think theyre skipping a few steps.

For those reasons, Im skeptical that deep learning alone is the path to AGI. I believe well need more than bigger databases and additional parameters to tweak. Well need an entirely new conceptual approach to machine learning.

I do think that humanity will eventually succeed in the quest to build AGI. My best guess is that we will knock on AGIs door sometime around the early-to-mid 2100s, and that, when we do, well find that it looks quite different from what the scientists at DeepMind are envisioning.

But the beautiful thing about science is that you have to show your work, and, right now, DeepMind is doing just that. Its got every opportunity to prove me and the other naysayers wrong.

I truly, deeply hope it succeeds.

Tristan Greene is a futurist who believes in the power of human-centered technology. Hes currently the editor of The Next Webs futurism vertical, Neural.

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Opinion: The Long, Uncertain Road to Artificial General Intelligence - Undark Magazine

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., speaks during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Oct. 19, 2021. Wyden says he has long been concerned about the algorithms used by his state's child welfare system. Mandel Ngan/AP hide caption

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., speaks during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Oct. 19, 2021. Wyden says he has long been concerned about the algorithms used by his state's child welfare system.

Child welfare officials in Oregon will stop using an algorithm to help decide which families are investigated by social workers, opting instead for a new process that officials say will make better, more racially equitable decisions.

The move comes weeks after an Associated Press review of a separate algorithmic tool in Pennsylvania that had originally inspired Oregon officials to develop their model, and was found to have flagged a disproportionate number of Black children for "mandatory" neglect investigations when it first was in place.

Oregon's Department of Human Services announced to staff via email last month that after "extensive analysis" the agency's hotline workers would stop using the algorithm at the end of June to reduce disparities concerning which families are investigated for child abuse and neglect by child protective services.

"We are committed to continuous quality improvement and equity," Lacey Andresen, the agency's deputy director, said in the May 19 email.

Jake Sunderland, a department spokesman, said the existing algorithm would "no longer be necessary," since it can't be used with the state's new screening process. He declined to provide further details about why Oregon decided to replace the algorithm and would not elaborate on any related disparities that influenced the policy change.

Hotline workers' decisions about reports of child abuse and neglect mark a critical moment in the investigations process, when social workers first decide if families should face state intervention. The stakes are high not attending to an allegation could end with a child's death, but scrutinizing a family's life could set them up for separation.

From California to Colorado and Pennsylvania, as child welfare agencies use or consider implementing algorithms, an AP review identified concerns about transparency, reliability and racial disparities in the use of the technology, including their potential to harden bias in the child welfare system.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said he had long been concerned about the algorithms used by his state's child welfare system and reached out to the department again following the AP story to ask questions about racial bias a prevailing concern with the growing use of artificial intelligence tools in child protective services.

"Making decisions about what should happen to children and families is far too important a task to give untested algorithms," Wyden said in a statement. "I'm glad the Oregon Department of Human Services is taking the concerns I raised about racial bias seriously and is pausing the use of its screening tool."

Sunderland said Oregon child welfare officials had long been considering changing their investigations process before making the announcement last month.

He added that the state decided recently that the algorithm would be completely replaced by its new program, called the Structured Decision Making model, which aligns with many other child welfare jurisdictions across the country.

Oregon's Safety at Screening Tool was inspired by the influential Allegheny Family Screening Tool, which is named for the county surrounding Pittsburgh, and is aimed at predicting the risk that children face of winding up in foster care or being investigated in the future. It was first implemented in 2018. Social workers view the numerical risk scores the algorithm generates the higher the number, the greater the risk as they decide if a different social worker should go out to investigate the family.

But Oregon officials tweaked their original algorithm to only draw from internal child welfare data in calculating a family's risk, and tried to deliberately address racial bias in its design with a "fairness correction."

In response to Carnegie Mellon University researchers' findings that Allegheny County's algorithm initially flagged a disproportionate number of Black families for "mandatory" child neglect investigations, county officials called the research "hypothetical," and noted that social workers can always override the tool, which was never intended to be used on its own.

Wyden is a chief sponsor of a bill that seeks to establish transparency and national oversight of software, algorithms and other automated systems.

"With the livelihoods and safety of children and families at stake, technology used by the state must be equitable and I will continue to watchdog," Wyden said.

The second tool that Oregon developed an algorithm to help decide when foster care children can be reunified with their families remains on hiatus as researchers rework the model. Sunderland said the pilot was paused months ago due to inadequate data but that there is "no expectation that it will be unpaused soon."

In recent years while under scrutiny by a crisis oversight board ordered by the governor, the state agency currently preparing to hire its eighth new child welfare director in six years considered three additional algorithms, including predictive models that sought to assess a child's risk for death and severe injury, whether children should be placed in foster care, and if so, where. Sunderland said the child welfare department never built those tools, however.

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Oregon is dropping an artificial intelligence tool used in child welfare system - NPR