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Representatives for DMG MORI and Illinois Institute of Technology, who are developing a national center for advanced manufacturing in Chicago, discussed shared goals of providing the workforce training to prepare the millions of new workers needed to help revive American semiconductor and advanced manufacturing sectors, as well as cultivating applied research and development in critical industrial sectors.

Illinois Institute of Technology's Center for Assured and Resilient Navigation in Advanced Transportation Systems (CARNATIONS), led by Professor Boris Pervan, was named a new Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT). As a Tier 1 UTC, CARNATIONS will receive a $10 million grant from USDOT for improving transportation navigation systems by making them more resilient to cyber attacks such as spoofing and jamming.

“Causation is links in a chain, and that’s a very long chain,” says Doug Godfrey, professor of legal writing and research at Chicago-Kent College of Law. “There’s also intervening causes, which can break the chain. I’m sure the defense can point to many other things or people that may have contributed.”

“At times, individuals or groups file lawsuits not with the aim of winning, but with the aim of getting leverage,” says Harold Krent, professor at Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law. “I think this is ultimately about pressing McDonald’s to do something about the prior suit as opposed to actually winning this one.”

“There’s been a material increase in the capabilities of these tools, of these large language models, particularly with GPT but just in general, and that does bear on the type of work that lawyers do,” says Daniel Martin Katz, a law professor at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent School of Law. “This is important for lawyers because we have technology that’s finally pretty good at language, and that has always been a challenge.”

“Twitter has been relatively small, but it's had an outsized influence, because it's the place where journalists go,” says Mar Hicks, associate professor of the history of technology at Illinois Institute of Technology. “For it to descend into chaos, in multiple ways, is really dangerous.”

At the Digital Universities U.S. conference held at Illinois Institute of Technology, internet pioneer Vinton Cerf has urged higher education leaders to modify not just their assessment methods but their overall teaching and research approaches as artificial intelligence advances. “Higher education has an obligation to explain what those problems are, how they arise, and what we can do to ameliorate the potential hazardous effects,” said Cerf, now the chief internet evangelist at Google.

Digital Universities U.S., a conference held at ������̳ and co-hosted by Times Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, had its share of technology enthusiasm in hallway discussions and on the agenda, but the event was far from a pep rally, with many speakers expressing worries about the rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence, bemoaning the tendency to embrace the latest “bright shiny object,” and cautioning against use of technology that isn’t directly in service of institutions’ core missions. At one session, Michael Gosz, ������̳'s vice president of data analytics, heralded a course recommendation system that has streamlined the advising process, but he acknowledged that the system worked well because the data that drive the recommendations were generated through deep conversations between advisers and students in the past—conversations that the mechanized system might reduce the need for. “What happens in the future? Does the system degrade over time?”

IIT College of Architecture Dean Reed Kroloff, critic Aaron Betsky, and local architect Eric Strain, FAIA, discuss the characteristics of Las Vegas architecture and Strain's work during a recent conversation at the University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Architecture.

“The court, I think, has battled back [against the Chevron doctrine] because it thinks that it’s not right for agencies to share with the court the power to interpret congressional language,” says Harold Krent, professor at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law. “The court thinks it’s their own prerogative to interpret what Congress says, and therefore to share it with agencies by giving this leeway to reasonable agency interpretation of statutory language would be to limit their own power. So in some ways, Chevron is an ideological war that the court is waging in order to affirm its own superiority in terms of statutory interpretation.”