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Olja Ivanic looked forward to welcoming some cousins from Sweden to her Denver home in June. Ivanic and the four travelers were planning to go hiking in Colorado and then visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. But then President Donald Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a February meeting at the White House. Ivanics four relatives immediately canceled their scheduled trip and decided to vacation in Europe instead. The way (Trump) treated a democratic president thats in a war was beyond comprehensible to them, said Ivanic, who is the U.S. CEO of Austria-based health startup Longevity Labs. The U.S. tourism industry expected 2025 to be another good year in terms of foreign travelers. The number of international visitors to the United States jumped in 2024, and some forecasts predicted arrivals from abroad this year would reach pre-COVID levels. But three months into the year, international arrivals are plummeting. Angered by Trumps tariffs and rhetoric, and alarmed by reports of tourists being arrested at the border, some citizens of other countries are staying away from the U.S. and choosing to travel elsewhere. The federal government’s National Travel and Tourism Office released preliminary figures Tuesday showing visits to the U.S. from overseas fell 11.6% in March compared to the same month last year. The figures did not include arrivals from Canada, which is scheduled to report tourism data later this week, or land crossings from Mexico. But air travel from Mexico dropped 23%. For the January-March period, 7.1 million visitors entered the U.S. from overseas, 3.3% fewer than during the first three months of 2024. The travel forecasting company Tourism Economics, which as recently as December anticipated the U.S. would have nearly 9% more international arrivals this year, revised its annual outlook last week to predict a 9.4% decline. Tourism Economics expects some of the steepest declines will be from Canada, where Trumps repeated suggestion that the country should become the 51st state and tariffs on close trading partners have angered residents. Canada was the largest source of visitors to the U.S. in 2024, with more than 20.2 million, according to U.S. government data. Flight Centre Travel Group Canada, a travel booking site, said leisure bookings to U.S. destinations were down 40% in March compared to the same month a year ago. Air Canada has reduced its schedule of spring flights to Florida, Las Vegas, and Arizona due to lack of demand. The National Travel and Tourism Office gave a rosier forecast last month for international travel to the U.S. Based on 2024 travel patterns, the office said it expected arrivals to increase 6.5% to 77.1 million this year and surpass 2019 levels in 2026. But Tourism Economics said the impact of the less favorable view of the U.S. from abroad could be severe enough that international visits won’t surpass pre-pandemic levels until 2029. The survey data is all indicating a significant mix of cancellations and a massive drop in intent to travel, Tourism Economics President Adam Sacks said. Ian Urquhart, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, was supposed to go to Las Vegas for five days in June and see Coldplay in concert. He canceled the trip to protest Trump’s incredibly disparaging tone toward Canada even though it meant losing a $500 deposit on the vacation package. His oldest daughter similarly nixed a planned May trip to Sedona, Arizona, while his brother-in-law decided not to go on his usual weeklong golf trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Urquhart. None of us jumped for joy when we made those decisions, but it seemed to be one of the few ways we could signal how we felt about the bullying that has been directed towards Canada by your president, Urquhart said. For Pepa Cuevas and her husband, who live in Madrid, Trumps election in November was a turning point. The couple had planned to spend a month skiing in Colorado over the winter holidays. They went to Japan instead. Trumps victory left us, especially me, very shocked, Cuevas said. For the moment, we have lost the desire to return. I dont know what will happen in the future, but for the moment we are still shocked, and it doesnt look like this is going to be resolved. According to the government data released Tuesday, international arrivals from China were down nearly 1%. Leisure trips by Chinese citizens to places like Disneyland, Hawaii and New York are decreasing dramatically and likely wont pick up again until Trump has left office, said Wolfgang Georg Arlt, the CEO of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute. He dubs it the Trump Slump. That slump has financial consequences. Tourism Economics expects U.S. spending by international visitors to drop by $9 billion this year. Marco Jahn is the president and CEO of New World Travel, a California company that works with overseas tour operators on vacation packages and activity planning. It arranges the hotels and rental cars for a family that wants to take a driving tour of U.S. national parks, for example. Jahn said bookings have dropped between 20% and 50%, depending on the source market, over the last eight to 10 weeks. He notes particular declines from Scandinavia, where Trumps repeated threat to take control of Greenland, a self-governing territory of NATO ally Denmark, has antagonized citizens. The U.S. is not perceived as a welcoming destination, Jahn said. Beyond, a revenue management platform for vacation rental owners, said Canadian searches for short-term rentals in the U.S. plunged 44% after Feb. 1, when Trump first announced a since-paused 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico. Florida, Texas, and New York were among the hardest-hit markets, Beyond said. American Ring Travel, a tour operator based in California, offers carbon-neutral bus tours of the U.S. that often attract eco-conscious travelers from Europe, said Richard Groesz, the companys director of contracting. But bookings from Germany flattened starting in January after Elon Musk threw his support behind a far-right political party in that countrys federal election, Groesz said. There are other issues impacting foreign visits. The U.S. has been the top destination by country for Japanese tourists for years, but data ompiled by JTB Tourism Research & Consulting showed South Korea topped the U.S. in January. The weak yen not Trump is likely the biggest factor dampening the attraction of the U.S., said Takaaki Mitamura, a spokesperson for Tokyo-based travel agent Veltra Corp. Travelers are picking destinations where the currency effect isnt as big, like South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Australia, he said. Haruka Atomiya, a Tokyo resident, visits Los Angeles at least once a year. Last year, she brought her young children for the first time and did a lot of research to find affordable places to stay. The exchange rate made some hotels double or triple the price she paid in the past. Atomiya, who went to college in Vermont, has always loved the diversity and the freedom in the U.S. She said she doesnt understand why Americans elected Trump, but doesnt plan to stop visiting unless she senses any physical danger. If America changes in a way thats clearly visible, thats a reality, too, and I will likely keep visiting, she said. What will happen to America after Trump intrigues me. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP business writer AP Writers Yuri Kageyama and Teresa Medrano contributed to this report.
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Understanding intelligence and creating intelligent machines are grand scientific challenges of our times. The ability to learn from experience is a cornerstone of intelligence for machines and living beings alike. In a remarkably prescient 1948 report, Alan Turingthe father of modern computer scienceproposed the construction of machines that display intelligent behavior. He also discussed the education of such machines by means of rewards and punishments. Turings ideas ultimately led to the development of reinforcement learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning designs intelligent agents by training them to maximize rewards as they interact with their environment. As a machine learning researcher, I find it fitting that reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton were awarded the 2024 ACM Turing Award. What is reinforcement learning? Animal trainers know that animal behavior can be influenced by rewarding desirable behaviors. A dog trainer gives the dog a treat when it does a trick correctly. This reinforces the behavior, and the dog is more likely to do the trick correctly the next time. Reinforcement learning borrowed this insight from animal psychology. But reinforcement learning is about training computational agents, not animals. The agent can be a software agent like a chess-playing program. But the agent can also be an embodied entity like a robot learning to do household chores. Similarly, the environment of an agent can be virtual, like the chessboard or the designed world in a video game. But it can also be a house where a robot is working. Just like animals, an agent can perceive aspects of its environment and take actions. A chess-playing agent can access the chessboard configuration and make moves. A robot can sense its surroundings with cameras and microphones. It can use its motors to move about in the physical world. Agents also have goals that their human designers program into them. A chess-playing agents goal is to win the game. A robots goal might be to assist its human owner with household chores. The reinforcement learning problem in AI is how to design agents that achieve their goals by perceiving and acting in their environments. Reinforcement learning makes a bold claim: All goals can be achieved by designing a numerical signal, called the reward, and having the agent maximize the total sum of rewards it receives. Researchers do not know if this claim is actually true, because of the wide variety of possible goals. Therefore, it is often referred to as the reward hypothesis. Sometimes it is easy to pick a reward signal corresponding to a goal. For a chess-playing agent, the reward can be +1 for a win, 0 for a draw, and -1 for a loss. It is less clear how to design a reward signal for a helpful household robotic assistant. Nevertheless, the list of applications where reinforcement learning researchers have been able to design good reward signals is growing. A big success of reinforcement learning was in the board game Go. Researchers thought that Go was much harder than chess for machines to master. The company DeepMind, now Google DeepMind, used reinforcement learning to create AlphaGo. AlphaGo defeated top Go player Lee Sedol in a five-match game in 2016. A more recent example is the use of reinforcement learning to make chatbots such as ChatGPT more helpful. Reinforcement learning is also being used to improve the reasoning capabilities of chatbots. Reinforcement learnings origins However, none of these successes could have been foreseen in the 1980s. That is when Barto and his then-PhD student Sutton proposed reinforcement learning as a general problem-solving framework. They drew inspiration not only from animal psychology but also from the field of control theory, the use of feedback to influence a systems behavior, and optimization, a branch of mathematics that studies how to select the best choice among a range of available options. They provided the research community with mathematical foundations that have stood the test of time. They also created algorithms that have now become standard tools in the field. It is a rare advantage for a field when pioneers take the time to write a textbook. Shining examples like The Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling and The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth are memorable because they are few and far between. Sutton and Bartos Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction was first published in 1998. A second edition came out in 2018. Their book has influenced a generation of researchers and has been cited more than 75,000 times. Reinforcement learning has also had an unexpected impact on neuroscience. The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in reward-driven behaviors in humans and animals. Researchers have used specific algorithms developed in reinforcement learning to explain experimental findings in people and animals dopamine system. Barto and Suttons foundational work, vision and advocacy have helped reinforcement learning grow. Their work has inspired a large body of research, made an impact on real-world applications, and attracted huge investments by tech companies. Reinforcement learning researchers, Im sure, will continue to see further ahead by standing on their shoulders. Ambuj Tewari is a professor of statistics at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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For Paul, a finance administrator, things came to a head when his report mistakenly included 7,000,000 of costs rather than 700,000. Fearing accusations of fraud, Paul disclosed his recent dementia diagnosis to his boss. Six weeks of sick leave became six months, and then a stepping stone to early retirement. Several years later, Paul regrets his unwanted unemployment, but at the time there didnt seem to be an alternative. Paul was participating in an unrelated study about public transport when he told us about his unemployment. As researchers, we had heard many similar accounts so we decided to dig down into the research on work and dementia. We were curious about how typical Pauls experience was of the trajectories of people diagnosed while working. The ageing of populations around the world is influencing our lives in many ways. More people are extending their working lives beyond traditional retirement ages, and many more are being diagnosed with dementia. Around 9% of the worlds 55 million people with dementia are under 65, with around 370,000 new cases of young-onset dementia annually. It is striking then, that despite government and business commitments to support longer working lives and inclusive employment practices, workers with dementia are largely ignored. What little evidence we have paints a picture of widespread and unwanted unemployment. For some, this takes the form of redundancy or retirement. For others like Paul a period of temporary leave gradually evolves into a permanent exit. Alongside workforce ageing, digital transformation is perhaps the single most important development in modern industry. Almost all our working lives are now shaped by digital technologies in some form. Older people are often stereotyped as technologically incompetent. This can be even worse for people with dementia. When exciting digital innovations are discussed in relation to them, the focus is almost always on providing care. But someone diagnosed with dementia in their 60s today might have been blogging in their 30s, scrolling social media on a phone in their 40s and using a smart home assistant in their 50s. The tech is here already The reality is that many people with dementia use digital tools every day. This ranges from familiar products like Google Maps to more cutting-edge technologies. A person with dementia recently introduced us to their voice-activated AI companion, with which they watch and discuss films. These companions can provide vital social interaction for people fearing judgement or isolation because of their cognitive decline. Far from being a barrier, digital technologies could offer ways to help people with dementia to enjoy positive working lives, just as they help workers who dont have dementia. The trick is to use them to tailor work and workplaces to the individual. For example, if a worker is struggling to remember appointments, automated and shared calendar scheduling can take care of that. If a worker has impaired wayfinding, mapping apps can be tailored to working environments and live location data can be used to guide staff around complicated sites. This is hardly futuristic tech. Many of us would struggle without our online calendars and maps. Research shows that touchscreens can be particularly challenging for older people with dementia. To make interfaces more suitable, developers could encourage the integration of voice-operated smart assistants into employee workstations (think of Amazons Alexa or Apples Siri). While discussions of dementia often focus on memory loss, the various types of dementia are associated with a wide range of symptoms. One very common symptom is the struggle to find the right words. But recent developments in generative AI (like OpenAIs ChatGPT) are proficient at predicting and expressing the next word in a sequence. These tools are also excellent at transforming text into different formats. Guidance on dementia-friendly information recommends features such as large fonts, single-clause sentences and single-syllable words. A generative AI tool could quickly transform documents into dementia-friendly formats. The integration of these tools into emailing and writing applications could make a lot of work far more accessible to people with dementia. These days, it makes little sense for workers to be manually entering costings into a spreadsheet. Dementia or no dementia, these practices are ripe for human error. By outsourcing them to digital technologies, we can free up our ageing workforces to use their unmatched skills, such as networking and experience. In practice, employers will likely be responsible for supporting positive working lives with dementia in the future. The best way to do this will be to develop strategies, in consultation with people with dementia, that identify interventions suitable for the workplace. Then, when an employee is diagnosed, they can pick and mix a personalised collection of tools to address their needs. Right now, we are not aware of any workplace that has such a strategy. But many organisations already have robust policies for other conditions. Our own employer, the University of Bath, has a repository of reasonable adjustments that can be tailored to support staff and students experiencing mental illness. Dementia could be approached in much the same way. The UK government is currently attempting to increase the number of people with disabilities participating in the labour market. It is simultaneously driving an agenda to increase the use of AI throughout the country. The potential of a digital working life for people with dementia highlights both promise and peril. Simply forcing every person into work is a surefire way of turnin challenging situations into real problems. But providing tailored support for those who want to work can enrich organisations and workers alike. James Fletcher is a lecturer (assistant professor) of management information, decisions & operations at the Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour at the University of Bath. Olivia Brown is an associate professor in digital futures at the University of Bath. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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