Michael Johnston

Dec 11, 2024 | nzherald.co.nz | Bali Haque |Michael Johnston

The gender pay gap is far more attributable to men and women and women choosing different kinds of work and having different average levels of experience than it is to bias or sexism, Bali Haque and Dr Michael Johnston say. Photo / SuppliedOpinion by Bali Haque and Dr Michael JohnstonBali Haque (MNZM) was a secondary school principal and is currently a New Plymouth District councillor and author. Dr Michael Johnston is a Senior Fellow at the New Zealand Initiative.

Nov 14, 2024 | adn.com | Michael Johnston

I was having problems with some Social Security paperwork that had seemed to hit a logjam. My wife passed away in February and my paperwork kept getting delayed. Social Security’s estimate for the processing time is “approximately 60 days.” After four months, I contacted the offices of Sen. Dan Sullivan, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Mary Peltola. I heard from Sullivan’s office almost immediately, and they proceeded to contact the Social Security office. My paperwork was approved within about a week.

Oct 21, 2024 | amazon.science | Prasoon Goyal |Michael Johnston |Reza Ghanadan |Javier Chiyah-Garcia

In-Context Learning (ICL) has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to excel as generalpurpose models in zero and few-shot task settings. However, since LLMs are often not trained on the downstream tasks, they lack crucial contextual knowledge from the data distributions, which limits their task adaptability. This paper explores using data priors to automatically customize prompts in ICL.

Jul 3, 2024 | amazon.science | JAMES MULLEN |Prasoon Goyal |Robinson Piramuthu |Michael Johnston

Home robots intend to make their users lives easier. Our work moves toward more helpful home robots by enabling them to inform their users of dangerous or unsanitary anomalies in the home. Some examples of these anomalies include the user leaving their milk out, forgetting to turn off the stove, or leaving poison accessible to children. To enable home robots with these abilities, we have created a new dataset, which we call SafetyDetect.

Jun 19, 2024 | nzherald.co.nz | Michael Johnston

AI is revolutionising the world as we know it. Photo / 123RFTHREE KEY FACTS:Artificial intelligence use has gone global since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. Concerns AI could undermine education by substituting the teaching of knowledge and writing skills, risking critical thinking development. For better or worse, it is safe to say few areas of life will be left untouched by AI. Dr Michael Johnston is a Senior Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative.