Latest news with #JohnMcCarthy
Time of India
6 days ago
- Science
- Time of India
Artificial Intelligence Explainer: The Martech Glossary
AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems. In MarTech , AI is used for personalisation, predictive analytics , automation and more. AI captured public imagination in recent times, when ChatGPT developed by OpenAI was launched as a "research preview" on November 30, 2022. Within a week, the world was talking about the development. However, the origins of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be traced back to the mid-20th century, with its roots in mathematics, philosophy and computer science. While the idea of creating intelligent machines has been contemplated for centuries, the modern field of AI as an academic discipline began in the 1950s. The formal beginning of AI as a field of research is widely considered to be the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956. This summer conference, organised by John McCarthy, brought together leading researchers to discuss the possibility of creating "thinking machines." It was at this workshop that McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence." Before this pivotal event, several key figures laid the groundwork for the future of AI. Alan Turing, often called the "father of computer science," explored the concept of machine intelligence in his 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". He proposed the Turing Test, a method for determining if a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper that provided a mathematical description of how neurons in the brain might work, which was a crucial step toward the development of artificial neural networks. Arthur Samuel, a computer scientist at IBM, created a checkers program in the early 1950s that could learn from its own experience and improve its gameplay, a foundational example of machine learning. Following the Dartmouth Workshop, the field of AI experienced periods of rapid growth and setbacks, often referred to as "AI winters". The early years saw a great deal of optimism and progress. Researchers like Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A Simon developed some of the first AI programs, including the Logic Theorist, which could solve mathematical theorems. The decade of the 1970s marked the first "AI winter," as funding and interest waned due to the failure of AI to deliver on its ambitious promises. In the 1980s, a resurgence of interest occurred with the rise of "expert systems," which were designed to mimic the decision-making of human experts in specific domains. From the 1990s, the emergence of machine learning approaches and the first major AI victories in games, such as IBM's Deep Blue defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 were highlights in the progress of AI. The current "AI boom" has been fueled by the availability of vast amounts of data, increased computational power, and the development of deep learning techniques , particularly with the introduction of the transformer architecture in 2017, which has been instrumental in the creation of large language models like GPT. The public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 was a landmark moment, as it brought the power of this technology to a wide audience and sparked a massive surge of interest and investment in Generative AI .
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Daily Mail
Mother 'murdered her two young children then went to group therapy and JOKED about it'
A mother charged with murdering her two youngest children went to a group therapy meeting hours after their deaths and joked about strangling them, prosecutors allege. Catherine Hoggle was arrested and charged on Friday with the 2014 murders of three-year-old Sarah and two-year-old Jacob. Three years prior, a judge had dismissed an earlier indictment charging her with the same crimes, deeming her unfit to stand trial due to her mental health. On Tuesday, the court heard prosecutors reveal they have new evidence implying she confessed to the murders. Montgomery County State Attorney John McCarthy told the court she attended a group-therapy session with the father of the children, Troy Turney, hours after their deaths. 'At that point in time, she made a comment to a woman that was in those therapy sessions with her that she had strangled her children,' McCarthy said. He alleged Hoggle made a 'strangling' motion with her hands before ultimately insisting she was joking. He argued against her request to be released on bond, noting there was a third, surviving child she could attempt to harm if freed. Police allege Hoggle was last seen with little Jacob on September 7, 2014, after driving off with him. She returned home and allegedly told family members she had dropped him to a friend's house for a sleepover. That night, police allege Hoggle secretly took Sarah from the home. Neither Sarah or Jacob have ever been seen again. The new warrant states investigators met with a criminal profiler with the FBI who noted: 'It was their belief that the children were murdered, likely by strangulation and their bodies were disposed of via an outside trash container.' Hoggle had allegedly intended to abduct the children's older brother, then five, from his school bus stop but the plan was foiled by the boy's father. She was initially arrested and charged with neglect and abduction, both misdemeanors. She was sent to the state-run psychiatric hospital for treatment. Then in 2017, she was indicted on murder charges. A judge ruled she was incompetent to stand trial and imposed continuing court-ordered treatment. Under state law, authorities had five years to declare her competent to stand trial; otherwise, criminal charges would be dismissed. Hoggle has long suffered from severe mental illness. She has a history of schizophrenia and was treated with antipsychotic medications after her arrest. In 2022, a Montgomery County judge dropped the charges against her, citing the five-year time limit. Hoggle was ordered to remain involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment because she was still considered a danger to herself or others. McCarthy vowed then that if she were ever deemed no longer a threat and released, he would charge her again with murder.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Mother of 2 missing children held without bail after previous case dropped for mental health reasons
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) — A Maryland woman with a long history of severe mental illness has been held without bail after she was recently rearrested and charged with murder in the 2014 disappearance of her two children — almost three years after an earlier case against her was dropped. A judge dismissed the previous murder charges in 2022 because Catherine Hoggle had been repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial. But that didn't stop prosecutors from indicting Hoggle again after her recent release from a state-run psychiatric hospital where she spent the past 11 years. The new indictment marks the latest twist in a case that began when her toddler son and daughter went missing and were never found. Catherine Hoggle, 38, was arrested Friday. She appeared in Montgomery Circuit Court for a bail review hearing Tuesday afternoon, wearing a tan jumpsuit and glasses. She sat quietly and listened to the proceedings, without showing any obvious emotion as prosecutors laid out the allegations against her. Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy alleged that Hoggle confessed to strangling her children during a conversation with another woman attending a group-therapy session around the time of their disappearance. McCarthy also described a drawing he said Hoggle made in response to a prompt about eliminating stressors from your life: It showed children being thrown into a trash can. 'You think you have stress in your life? I just strangled my two children,' Hoggle told the woman, according to McCarthy's account. Defense attorney says Hoggle remains mentally incompetent Hoggle's attorney, David Felsen, criticized the state's attorney for introducing facts during what he called a '45-minute opening statement' meant for the beginning of a criminal trial, not a bail hearing. Felsen argued that Hoggle remains mentally incompetent to stand trial. That finding hasn't changed since 2022, he said. 'As she sits, she is non-restorable,' he told the court. But prosecutors argued she had been functioning enough over the past few weeks to show a substantial change in her mental state that allowed for her recent discharge from Maryland's Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. Since then, McCarthy said she was simply 'free in the community,' living in a group home and walking around town. He raised concerns about the safety of a third surviving child. Hoggle's mother also criticized the circumstances around her release from the hospital. Lindsey Hoggle told reporters after the hearing that her daughter was abruptly discharged into the community — from 'shackles and handcuffs to living on her own in a dorm-like facility.' She should be receiving psychiatric treatment, not sitting in jail, Lindsey Hoggle said. But Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Jeannie Cho ordered Hoggle held without bail because she could otherwise pose a flight risk and a 'great danger' to the community. 'There is a great deal of information that showed a concerted effort to hide herself and conceal the evidence and to be deceptive,' Cho said before announcing her ruling. The judge noted that Hoggle is currently prescribed 22 different medications. Keeping her on this treatment regimen could be difficult in a group home environment with 'little to no supervision that I can glean,' Cho said. It is still not exactly clear why Hoggle was released from the hospital. First arrest was in 2014 Her children, Sarah and Jacob Hoggle, were ages 3 and 2 respectively when they were last seen in September 2014. Catherine Hoggle also went missing around the same time. The children's father reported them all missing. Hoggle was found days later, walking in a nearby town. Police said she refused to tell them where the children were. She was initially arrested and charged with neglect and abduction, both misdemeanors. She was sent to the state-run psychiatric hospital for treatment. Then in 2017, she was indicted on murder charges. A judge ruled she was incompetent to stand trial and imposed continuing court-ordered treatment. Under state law, authorities had five years to declare her competent to stand trial. That didn't happen, so in 2022, a Montgomery County judge dropped the charges against her, citing the five-year time limit. Hoggle was ordered to remain involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment because she was still considered a danger to herself or others. During Tuesday's hearing, Hoggle's attorney raised questions about the strength of the state's case. He presented records showing that a court commissioner had found insufficient probable cause to issue an arrest warrant for the murder charges. In response, prosecutors took the case to a grand jury instead, which issued the indictment. Prosecutors said nothing about that process weakens their case. Family members seek answers Hoggle's mother and other family members watched from the courtroom gallery, including the children's father, Troy Turner, whose shirt was emblazoned with a message seeking justice for Sarah and Jacob. In remarks after the hearing, Turner said he still wants answers. He said he hopes that by prosecuting Hoggle again, the court system will finally reveal what happened to his children. Solve the daily Crossword
Associated Press
6 days ago
- Associated Press
Mother of 2 missing children held without bail after previous case dropped for mental health reasons
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) — A Maryland woman with a long history of severe mental illness has been held without bail after she was recently rearrested and charged with murder in the 2014 disappearance of her two children — almost three years after an earlier case against her was dropped. A judge dismissed the previous murder charges in 2022 because Catherine Hoggle had been repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial. But that didn't stop prosecutors from indicting Hoggle again after her recent release from a state-run psychiatric hospital where she spent the past 11 years. The new indictment marks the latest twist in a case that began when her toddler son and daughter went missing and were never found. Catherine Hoggle, 38, was arrested Friday. She appeared in Montgomery Circuit Court for a bail review hearing Tuesday afternoon, wearing a tan jumpsuit and glasses. She sat quietly and listened to the proceedings, without showing any obvious emotion as prosecutors laid out the allegations against her. Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy alleged that Hoggle confessed to strangling her children during a conversation with another woman attending a group-therapy session around the time of their disappearance. McCarthy also described a drawing he said Hoggle made in response to a prompt about eliminating stressors from your life: It showed children being thrown into a trash can. 'You think you have stress in your life? I just strangled my two children,' Hoggle told the woman, according to McCarthy's account. Defense attorney says Hoggle remains mentally incompetent Hoggle's attorney, David Felsen, criticized the state's attorney for introducing facts during what he called a '45-minute opening statement' meant for the beginning of a criminal trial, not a bail hearing. Felsen argued that Hoggle remains mentally incompetent to stand trial. That finding hasn't changed since 2022, he said. 'As she sits, she is non-restorable,' he told the court. But prosecutors argued she had been functioning enough over the past few weeks to show a substantial change in her mental state that allowed for her recent discharge from Maryland's Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. Since then, McCarthy said she was simply 'free in the community,' living in a group home and walking around town. He raised concerns about the safety of a third surviving child. Hoggle's mother also criticized the circumstances around her release from the hospital. Lindsey Hoggle told reporters after the hearing that her daughter was abruptly discharged into the community — from 'shackles and handcuffs to living on her own in a dorm-like facility.' She should be receiving psychiatric treatment, not sitting in jail, Lindsey Hoggle said. But Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Jeannie Cho ordered Hoggle held without bail because she could otherwise pose a flight risk and a 'great danger' to the community. 'There is a great deal of information that showed a concerted effort to hide herself and conceal the evidence and to be deceptive,' Cho said before announcing her ruling. The judge noted that Hoggle is currently prescribed 22 different medications. Keeping her on this treatment regimen could be difficult in a group home environment with 'little to no supervision that I can glean,' Cho said. It is still not exactly clear why Hoggle was released from the hospital. First arrest was in 2014 Her children, Sarah and Jacob Hoggle, were ages 3 and 2 respectively when they were last seen in September 2014. Catherine Hoggle also went missing around the same time. The children's father reported them all missing. Hoggle was found days later, walking in a nearby town. Police said she refused to tell them where the children were. She was initially arrested and charged with neglect and abduction, both misdemeanors. She was sent to the state-run psychiatric hospital for treatment. Then in 2017, she was indicted on murder charges. A judge ruled she was incompetent to stand trial and imposed continuing court-ordered treatment. Under state law, authorities had five years to declare her competent to stand trial. That didn't happen, so in 2022, a Montgomery County judge dropped the charges against her, citing the five-year time limit. Hoggle was ordered to remain involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment because she was still considered a danger to herself or others. During Tuesday's hearing, Hoggle's attorney raised questions about the strength of the state's case. He presented records showing that a court commissioner had found insufficient probable cause to issue an arrest warrant for the murder charges. In response, prosecutors took the case to a grand jury instead, which issued the indictment. Prosecutors said nothing about that process weakens their case. Family members seek answers Hoggle's mother and other family members watched from the courtroom gallery, including the children's father, Troy Turner, whose shirt was emblazoned with a message seeking justice for Sarah and Jacob. In remarks after the hearing, Turner said he still wants answers. He said he hopes that by prosecuting Hoggle again, the court system will finally reveal what happened to his children.
Gizmodo
31-07-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
AI Is Already Disrupting Labor, and Recent Grads Could Be a ‘Lost Generation'
'Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.' That's a direct quote from Ford CEO Jim Farley from earlier this month. And he is not the only executive ringing the alarm. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas recently told The Verge that he expects AI to be able to replace recruiters and executive assistants in the next six months. The warnings are plenty, and the timeline the executives give is relatively short. But the reality may be even more imminent. 'The disruption of jobs is already underway, it's expanding rapidly and it will continue to,' according to John McCarthy, associate professor of global labor and work at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Anthropic's latest AI assistant, released on July 15, pretty much does all the work that a finance intern would do at an average Wall Street firm. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke told the company's hiring managers that they have to explain why an AI agent can't do the job before they can go ahead with hiring new workers, in an internal memo earlier this year. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn sent a similar memo to workers this year. 'We can certainly say we are facing a serious breakdown in early stages of white-collar careers, and that's really important because that's where economic security begins and where we really build our foundations. And right now, that foundation is starting to be pulled away,' McCarthy told Gizmodo. It's a particularly bad time to be an unemployed 20-something right now. The New York Fed released a report in April saying that the labor market for recent college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 had 'deteriorated noticeably in the first quarter of 2025,' with an unemployment rate at its highest since the pandemic. And the gap in unemployment rates between recent graduates and all workers is at its widest since 1990. Some of that has to do with broader market level trends, the end of a post-covid hiring boom, and a softening economy, but AI is still a significant factor. Generative AI is particularly good at basic tasks, one that a recent graduate might be expected to complete as an entry-level worker. 'Evidence for AI's negative impact on early careers is already strong, and I worry that the current generational squeeze might evolve into a permanent reconfiguration of early career paths,' McCarthy said. This, in practice, is a tearing up of the social contract for recent graduates: entry level white-collar work is supposed to function as a training route for the rest of your career. With less of those opportunities at hand for recent college graduates, we are likely to see —and according to McCarthy are already seeing— increased reliance on elite internships and networking. That is only bound to widen inequality. 'There is a real fear that I have that an entire cohort, those graduating during the early AI transition, may kind of be a lost generation, unless policy, education and hiring norms adjust,' McCarthy said. 'And I'm not tremendously optimistic about those adjustments happening at the scale they need to.' New York University professor of management and organizations Robert Seamans, however, thinks we are not at the foot of a labor crisis because, despite the hype and the hiring freezes, we are actually seeing 'relatively low rates of AI adoption' across the corporate sector. According to a recent Fed paper, one of the biggest challenges in scaling AI right now is not the tech itself; it's getting businesses to actually use it. Most companies outside of tech, finance, and scientific industries have not worked generative AI into their daily operations yet, and even so adoption is far higher within larger firms than small ones, according to the paper. 'It's much harder to implement AI in a firm than people realize,' Seamans told Gizmodo. 'Firms don't typically have the in-house talent that's needed to train, operate and oversee whatever AI they implement, and so until you have the personnel in place that have that expertise, it's going to be really hard to rely heavily on AI.' Instead, Seamans thinks some of these companies who are freezing hiring or shrinking their headcount in favor of AI are actually using the technology as a scapegoat for the performance of their firm. 'It's much harder to blame tariffs or economic uncertainty for reasons why there's not as much hiring,' Seamans said. Nevertheless, even Seamans says he can't help but notice the signs pointing at AI as at least a partial culprit of what's happening in the labor market. But to better understand AI's role, we need the input of 'a fully funded U.S. statistical agency,' Seamans said, like the U.S. Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. 'I think it really highlights the need for the federal government to be tracking AI deployments in firms in real time, so that instead of speculating whether AI may or may not be responsible, we can actually do some research using current data,' Seamans said. AI is here to stay. And it's looking likely that AI innovation and proliferation in the corporate world are only bound to accelerate from here. That won't necessarily lead to 'wholesale termination' of jobs but rather a restructuring, according to McCarthy. 'Human work is shifting and it will continue to, it's really hard to forecast how it will shape out, but I think there will be enduring demand for roles that require judgment, ethics, creativity, and for jobs that require incorporating context,' McCarthy said. This restructuring is going to put pressure on colleges, and even K12 institutions, to prepare their students accordingly and not just in computer science classes. McCarthy says he is already implementing this himself at Cornell by teaching his students AI-assisted workflows and tools alongside other general skills in classes. The other half of the coin is policy. 'These changes are happening very fast and with greater potential to impact jobs at scale than at any point in history, and I think there are urgent needs for multi-stakeholder dialogue across all levels,' McCarthy said, adding that public policy, educational institutions, and the private sector should be in constant conversation with each other over how to address these issues. For workers looking to adapt, McCarthy says that what matters most is getting fluent in using AI tools, increasing your adaptability to new roles, and being ready to pivot whenever you may need to. 'I don't say those things lightly. Unfortunately, I don't think any of these changes will be easy or comfortable,' McCarthy said. 'I have a 7-year-old, and I worry very much about what the future of work will look like for him.'
