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davpoole.bsky.social

@davpoole.bsky.social
541 followers 159 following 8 posts

AI Educator, researcher, author. Professor Emeritus in CS at University of British Columbia. One of the founders of Statistical Relational AI. www.cs.ubc.ca/~poole

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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 19/01/2026
The Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award went to Alan Mackworth (@alanmackworth.bsky.social UBC) and David Poole (@davpoole.bsky.social UBC). At #AAAI2026, they'll be giving a talk "The Essence of Intelligence is Appropriate Action..." Sunday Jan 25 8:30AM @aaai.org @hadihoss.bsky.social
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Cambridge University Press @universitypress.cambridge.org · 14/03/2026
Congratulations to authors @davpoole.bsky.social and @alanmackworth.bsky.social on receiving the 2026 AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award 🎉 Learn more about 'Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents' 🔗 cup.org/4sjPDI8
Announcement image for the winners of the 2026 AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award. Photos and names of David L. Poole and Alan K. Mackworth are shown below the title.Cover of the book titled "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents, Third Edition" by David L. Poole and Alan K. Mackworth. The background features green neural network-like structures.
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UBC Computer Science @cs.ubc.ca · 23/02/2026
UBC Computer Science Professors Emeriti Alan Mackworth and David Poole were awarded the AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award for developing free online resources to learn foundations of AI. Congratulations! Read more: www.cs.ubc.ca/news/2026/02...
Drs. Mackworth and Poole recognized for making AI education accessible to students worldwide
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Alan Mackworth @alanmackworth.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
Delighted to receive this award with @davpoole.bsky.social. @cs.ubc.ca @aaai.org Talk details here aaai.org/conference/a... #ai
aaai.org
AAAI-26 Invited Speakers - AAAI
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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 19/01/2026
More details on their talk here: aaai.org/conference/a...
aaai.org
AAAI-26 Invited Speakers - AAAI
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davpoole.bsky.social @davpoole.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
"Generating text from LLMs can be seen as plagiarism, one word at a time." is a way to explain stochastic parrots of @emilymbender.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social Angelina McMillan-Major and @mmitchell.bsky.social Why AI can’t take over creative writing theconversation.com/why-ai-cant-...
theconversation.com
Why AI can’t take over creative writing
As a computer scientist, I would hope that human creativity is more than regurgitating what others have written.
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davpoole.bsky.social @davpoole.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
I wrote this piece on AI and creative writing after reading articles by creative writers lamenting the impact of AI theconversation.com/why-ai-cant-...
theconversation.com
Why AI can’t take over creative writing
As a computer scientist, I would hope that human creativity is more than regurgitating what others have written.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
The 2024 Turing Prize winners announced this morning: Barto & Sutton for "developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning". Well deserved. Built on 1959 Donald Michie's idea; matchboxes and colored beads learning tic-tac-toe. awards.acm.org/about/2024-t...
awards.acm.org
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton are the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginning...
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Daniel Lowd @dlowd.com · 17/01/2025
AI is like plastic — a lot of people hate it because it often comes across as fake and tacky, but it’s flexible and it’s cheap and there’s so many things that would be impossible or impractical without it. And yes, a lot of AI will be junk. Just like everything else. (cf Sturgeon’s Law.)
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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
The "Real World" is unfair. It is biased. And when it comes to estimating treatment effects, the "Big Data" can't fix a bias that's baked into how the data are collected (I would say "design", but there is usually no design involved). So pardon me if I prefer boring old "Useful Evidence".
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
I’m sorry, this might be a great investigation, but “as it was never intended” is obscene. This is precisely how many people specifically and repeatedly told us — warned us — it would be used.
The Washington post
Breaking News
Post Exclusive
8 minutes ago
Police use facial recognition as it was never intended: As a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without further evidence
Confident in unproven facial recognition technology, sometimes investigators skip steps, and at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested, a Washington Post investigation found.
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David Graeber Institute @davidgraeberinst.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Explanation of how the myth of the market being "the natural expression of human freedom" is well a myth. As Right-Wing Libertarians enjoy spreading this myth, we thought it's important to share this explanation.
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 11/01/2025
I genuinely cannot believe Google is now showing Gemini-generated medical snippets including *drug summaries and medical advice* to treatserious health conditions. I checked. It does. With barely a tiny disclaimer about GenAI. How can a (formerly?) trusted company be so incredibly reckless?
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David Graeber Institute @davidgraeberinst.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
This passage from the book, Bullshit Jobs, is worth a read.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
See aiguide.substack.com/p/ai-now-bea...
aiguide.substack.com
"AI now beats humans at basic tasks": Really?
Two weeks ago, Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals, had this jarring headline:
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Maike Osborne @maosbot.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
Autonomous vehicles accelerate the trend begun by cars of isolating travellers from their neighbourhoods, reducing neighbors to mere obstacles our sensors try to avoid, and hence dissolving the social bonds that hold together communities
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uai2026 @auai.org · 03/01/2025
🎊 Happy new year folks! 🎊 👀 ready to start working on that paper deadline? 👀
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davpoole.bsky.social @davpoole.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
I have created a list of open research problem from my work and from writing our textbook. Something to work on for the new year! Comments please! #relationallearning #causality #AI #aifca #starAI www.cs.ubc.ca/~poole/resea...
cs.ubc.ca
David Poole - Research
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Becky & Frank @beckyandfrank.com · 24/12/2024
Google AI reporting “no drug interactions” for two drugs that definitely have drug interactions. When can we collectively decide the AI experiment is over?
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Chris Stokel-Walker @stokel.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
The UK is consulting on plans to favour AI firms over creators when it comes to copyright. For @newscientist.bsky.social, I wrote about what that means www.newscientist.com/article/2461...
newscientist.com
UK plans to favour AI firms over creators with a new copyright regime
One of the biggest uncertainties in the ongoing AI revolution is whether these systems can legally be trained on copyrighted data. Now, the UK says it plans to clarify the matter with a change to the ...
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Christopher Barrie @cbarrie.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 16/12/2024
Dear computer vision researchers, students & practitioners🔇🔇🔇 Remi Denton & I have written what I consider to be a comprehensive paper on the harms of computer vision systems reported to date & how people have proposed addressing them, from different angles. PDF: cdn.sanity.io/files/wc2kmx...
Screenshot of Table of Contents (Part 1)

Contents
1 Introduction 217
2 Positionality 221
3 Overview of Risks and Harms Associated with Computer
Vision Systems and Proposed Mitigation Strategies 223
3.1 Representational Harms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
3.2 Quality-of-Service and Allocative Harms . . . . . . . . . . 229
3.3 Interpersonal Harms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
3.4 Societal Harms: System Destabilization and Exacerbating
Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
4 Frameworks and Principles for Computer Vision
Researchers 266
4.1 Guidelines for Responsible Data and Model Development . 267
4.2 Measurement Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
4.3 Reflexivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
5 Reorientations of Computer Vision Research 276
5.1 Grounded in Historical Context and Considering
Power Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
5.2 Small, Task Specific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
5.3 Community-Rooted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280Screenshot of Table of Contents (Part 2)

6 Systemic Change 285
6.1 Collective Action and Whistleblowing . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
6.2 Refusal/The Right not to Build Something . . . . . . . . . 287
6.3 Independent Funding Outside of Military and Multinational
Corporations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
7 Conclusion 291
References 293
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Max Kleiman-Weiner @maxkw.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Josh Tenenbaum on scaling up vs growing up and the path to human-like reasoning #NeurIPS2024
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davpoole.bsky.social @davpoole.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Two things I learned from #neurips2024 1) transcriptions are still terrible. The simultaneous transcriptions of the talks didn't take into account the vocabulary of the papers being presented. It's probably the fault of one-size-fits-all language models. There were slides with the vocabulary... 2/
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davpoole.bsky.social @davpoole.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
We are pleased to announce the latest version of AIPython.org: open-source, runnable pseudocode (in Python) for all your favorite AI algorithms, including search, CSPs, logic, planning, supervised machine learning, neural network, graphical models, unsupervised learning, causality, /2
aipython.org
AIPython
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Maike Osborne @maosbot.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Human minds, intelligences and states of consciousness are beautifully diverse—I just don't buy that the right approach for AI is "all you need is more compute", pretending AI has an objective view from nowhere, and being owned by a small number of homogenously white-bread tech firms
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Alan Richardson @alanrichardson.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Truly the stupidest idea I have ever seen in journalism.
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Gary Marcus @garymarcus.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
OpenAI and Anduril. Unreliable generative AI for warfare. What could possibly go wrong?
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Alan Mackworth @alanmackworth.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
“Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents” (3rd Edition) by @davpoole.bsky.social and @alanmackworth.bsky.social is available in hardcopy and with full, free, open access online: artint.info. Check out the endorsements: artint.info#endorsements
Cover of book "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents" (3rd Edition) by David L. Poole and Alan K. Mackworth, background of green stained neurons
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