hufaculty

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The AI+ Expo is in DC again. 1. In a panel titled, 'The Future of Learning, Talent, and Competitiveness in the Age of Al,' Northeastern University's president was striking in his two points: a. Becoming AI-proof is now a lifelong endeavor; b. Universities must help people not be obsolete. Of course, China is on everyone's mind on this subject. He mentioned how China now graduates twice the stem students than the U.S. and 10 times the number of engineers, and how it has "surpassed" the US in some domains. Why? Because, he averred, of the 'SOCIAL COMPACT' between government, industry, and universities.' He called for something similar in the US. 2. I wonder what a social compact looks like for an African country. 3. This is a matter African governments will face in the next five years, yet it is still under-discussed. The Boston Dynamics' dog, Spot (frame 1) or Tesla's Optimus (frame 4), for instance, would they understand my Zulu language? The question of which African languages gets fluent representation in the next decade of foundation models, which scholarship pipelines train the engineers who build them, and which research centers will shape the policy conversations, is quite salient. 4. There certainly is a China-West 'cold' contest to shape that African LLM-robotics space. 5. It was interesting to see how other universities are responding with new interdisciplinary approaches. Tech Diplomacy is now a whole (certificate) program at some universities, while others have Masters in Digital International Affairs.

Story. Struggle. Purpose. That’s where transformation starts.Join Stanley Andrisse + co-authors of Breaking Chains, Building Futures at Clevo Books. @prison2pro—these aren’t just stories. They’re proof. 🔗 #JusticeImpacted" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">luma.com/az2mw24f#Justi… #SecondChances

Talking about change isn’t enough—we have to build it. The Breaking Chains panel brings lived experience into real solutions. April 9, 3:30–4:30 PM. Show up ready. #breakingchains #P2P

The Earth is warming faster than previously estimated. latimes.com/environment/st…

It’s absolutely true, the Covid virus is a thromboembolic virus causing heart attacks and strokes, vaccination prevents heart disease. During the day I will provide scientific papers to support this. Watch out for the antivaccine activists with an agenda

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities nytimes.com/2026/03/07/art… via @NYTimes

Full Video: youtube.com/live/oBlqQaGQC… #SidneyPoitier #JamesEarlJones #CicelyTyson #BlackHollywood #AwardShows #CreatorEmpowerment

How natural history museums can help restore the natural world phys.org/news/2026-03-n…

Proud moment: the Prison-to-Professionals (Inside) course is live. As the flagship of @prison2pro, it equips incarcerated and formerly incarcerated learners with tools for college + careers. Now available to 2M+ learners via @Edovo. #PrisonEducation #SecondChances #Edovo

Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI. The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not. Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse. This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected. They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.

Unpopular (but urgent) take amid the frenzy around GPT-5.3-Codex, Claude Opus 4.6, and OpenClaw: With more people giving their mouse and keyboard to computer-use agents, the scariest thing is that we haven’t figured out how to monitor their actions, detect misaligned ones, and correct them before execution. Agents get tricked by malicious injections, delete files even without attacks, or wander off-task to perform irrelevant actions → causing real harm or derailing progress. We tackle this head-on: • MisActBench: First systematic benchmark for misaligned action detection, built from real agent trajectories • DeAction: A plug-and-play runtime guardrail Key results: DeAction catches misaligned actions from external attacks or internal failures with ~80 F1, with no performance hit on user-intended tasks and ~25% added latency (end-to-end online eval). Still much room to improve. See details below👇 Misalignment detection on the fly is critical and we must solve it before widespread CUA deployment! Kudos to the students @yuting_ning @Jaylen_JonesNLP @Zhehao_Zhang123 @osunlp and all collaborators from Amazon!

PEN America, 36 Organizational Partners, Call on Texas A&M to Rescind Censorship Policies pen.org/pen-america-pa…

While you were discovering Bad Bunny "América," NEH is announcing that their grants will now only cover AMERICAN history, which I guess is white male US history.

The 3rd Annual Africa-America Forum on China, held at John’s Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, was great. I was happy to present on the extent to which China’s LLMs seem so advanced in their breadth of coverage of African languages, including ones with relatively small numbers of speakers. More than being tools for soft power and Chinese statecraft, they are the rudiments of a Sino-centric education system that is bound to have an effect on African society - and they are open source. These advances are not waiting for African permission or U.S. competition to catch up. Basically, on the question of “who governs AI?” My answer: who makes it governs it.

I’m bringing Breaking Chains to Magers & Quinn. Incarceration, immigration, punishment, policy—same tree, real families. These stories come from lived sentences, reentry, and refusal to disappear. 📅 Free RSVP: conta.cc/4a0q8Uk Books are power. Stories are strategy.

If you want to know more about the history of slavery and anti-Black racism in Argentina, check this interview with historian Erika Edwards and her book Hiding in Plain Sight #BHM2026 #slaveryarchive batimes.com.ar/news/argentina…

OPEN ACCESS, free download : Digital Surveillance in Africa: Power, Agency, and Rights (Bloomsbury, 2025) edited by Tony Roberts and Admire Mare bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?doci…

The Breaking Chains Podcast isn’t just audio—it’s transformation. The movement continues. WE ARE THE EXPERTS 2 is coming—scholars leading the conversation conta.cc/49RvAdm #BreakingChains #WeAreTheExperts #SecondChances