Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2603.03532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Voting Advice Applications (VAA) are tools designed to help voters compare political candidates on policy preferences prior to elections. VAAs are popular tools in European countries and in other countries with multi-party democratic systems. Through a freedom of information request we got access to the inner workings of a popular Danish VAA called the 'textit{Kandidattest' which is implemented by a major Danish news outlet and has been used for general, municipal, and European elections. Users and politicians from every political party answer the same online questionnaire and get matched based on the agreement percentage stemming from their answers. VAAs play a significant role in elections with 45\% of surveyed voters reporting they followed their recommendations in the past Danish general election. However, the inner workings of VAAs have not been thoroughly evaluated until now. We find that the algorithm is not robust enough for u
arXiv:2601.18644v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The European Central Bank (ECB) is working on the "digital euro", an envisioned retail central bank digital currency for the Euro area. In this article, we take a closer look at the "digital euro FAQ", which provides answers to 26 frequently asked questions about the digital euro, and other published documents by the ECB on the topic. We question the provided answers based on our analysis of the current design in terms of privacy, technical feasibility, risks, costs and utility. In particular, we discuss the following key findings: (KF1) Central monitoring of all online digital euro transactions by the ECB threatens privacy even more than contemporary digital payment methods with segregated account databases. (KF2) The ECB's envisioned concept of a secure offline version of the digital euro offering full anonymity is in strong conflict with the actual history of hardware security breaches and mathematical evidence against it. (KF3) Th
arXiv:2508.15516v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Urban parks play a key role in supporting public health. Landscape architecture typically considers parks through the lens of form and function. While past research on equitable access has focused mainly on park form, studies addressing functional uses have been constrained by limited scale and coarse measurement techniques. Existing efforts have partially quantified park functions through small-scale surveys and movement data or general usage data, but have not effectively captured the specific activities and motivations underlying park visits. As a result, our understanding of the functional roles urban parks play remains incomplete. We introduce a novel method that refines mobile base station coverage using antenna azimuths, enabling more precise distinction of mobile traffic within parks versus surrounding areas. Using Paris as a case study, we analyze a large-scale dataset of passively collected per-app mobile network traffic acr
arXiv:2505.14215v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the growing integration of retrieval-enabled AI agents into society, their safety and ethical behavior remain inadequately understood. In particular, the integration of LLMs and AI agents with external information sources and real-world environments raises critical questions about how they engage with and are influenced by these external data sources and interactive contexts. This study investigates how expanding retrieval access -- from no external sources to Wikipedia-based retrieval and open web search -- affects model reliability, bias propagation, and harmful content generation. Through extensive benchmarking of censored and uncensored LLMs and AI agents, our findings reveal a consistent degradation in refusal rates, bias sensitivity, and harmfulness safeguards as models gain broader access to external sources, culminating in a phenomenon we term safety degradation. Notably, retrieval-enabled agents built on aligned LLMs
arXiv:2607.07277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Harmful online communication often contains slang, coded terms, abbreviations, and community-specific expressions, which make messages difficult to interpret. This paper presents an exploratory study of interpretation difficulty in Discord chats related to cybercrime. We construct reference interpretations of purposefully selected difficult messages, which were reviewed by an expert. We then use them to evaluate human and large language model (LLM) interpretations under different context conditions. The results show that local context alone is often insufficient for humans, while external knowledge and extended conversational context substantially improve human interpretation. For LLMs, local context also improves interpretation, and the larger model performs better. We further conduct a qualitative error analysis and propose a preliminary classification of factors that make harmful chats difficult to interpret. These findings suggest t
arXiv:2607.07652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search engines have long allocated attention on the web by routing users from queries to websites. AI search changes this arrangement because information needs can be resolved inside the intermediary. Using URL-level Comscore U.S. desktop clickstream, we compare ChatGPT and Google information-seeking occasions and exploit ChatGPT Search access expansions to estimate traditional search displacement. ChatGPT produces outbound clicks in only 5.2% of conversation sessions, far below Google's referral ratio. The remaining clicks are not a scaled-down Google stream: they skew toward specialized destinations and away from ad-supported sites. Wider access cuts search use by 9.4%, with search-referral losses largest for informational categories. Our findings identify a central economic shift in digital intermediation: AI search might satisfy information needs inside the intermediary while weakening the referral bargain that has linked search, traf
arXiv:2607.07612v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving from generative systems to agentic AI capable of autonomously planning and executing tasks. Widely characterized as the Year of Agentic AI, 2025 marked accelerated development and deployment, introducing new ethical and governance challenges. This paper presents a systematic review of the emerging literature on agentic AI governance. Our analysis identifies features that distinguish agentic AI from traditional systems and why it warrants targeted governance attention. We synthesize prevailing governance priorities, proposed mechanisms, and stakeholder roles shaping this evolving domain. As an initial scholarly effort, this review lays the preliminary groundwork for developing a structured roadmap to guide responsible and adaptive agentic AI governance.
arXiv:2607.07605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study adopts a behavioural bottom-up approach to AI value alignment to investigate whether an implicitly conveyed user identity shifts the moral evaluations of large language models (LLMs). Through a structured, multi-turn conversational protocol across 12,000 interactions, we evaluate AI value alignment in two non-reasoning models, gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14 and gemini-2.5-flash-lite. Rather than instructing the models to adopt a persona or prompting them with explicit moral stances, the user's professional role is introduced purely through value-neutral reasoning. The models are then asked for wrongness ratings from 0-100 on ten common-morality rules from Gert's moral framework. The results show that moral judgments vary with the user's role across both models. While grave-harm acts like killing exhibit a strong ceiling effect, contestable rule-governed acts demonstrate role-conditioned shifts that mirror the relationship between the
arXiv:2607.07267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims about the universality of human concepts have been predominantly assessed through linguistic similarity across languages and cultures. However, words are effective as communication devices because they compress rich experiential variation into shared conventions, potentially obscuring hidden individual and cultural differences in how concepts are mentally represented. Here, we analyse 2.6 billion human-made sketches of common concepts from 236 countries and territories to examine conceptual structure through people's visual imagination. Consistent with recent work on image-based cognition, we find that single concepts unfold into multiple distinct visual exemplars, revealing latent information about similarities and differences in conceptual structure across cultures. This variation is strongest for concepts involving haptic interaction, suggesting that visual imagery reflects variation in embodied experience as much as conventiona
arXiv:2607.06984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Misinformation often harms society not just by spreading a single false belief, but by breaking down the shared trust people rely on to evaluate what is true. This paper presents an agent-based simulation that frames trust as a collective resource and attention as a scarce private budget: when aggregate attention shifts toward low credibility content, the trust environment degrades, making credible information harder to process and correct. Across experiments, the model produces four recurring modes: credible stability, misinformation dominance, polarization, and a mixed baseline, with distinct signatures in trust trajectories and network structure. The results separate two control problems that matter for simulation-based policy exploration: the balance of trust repair versus harm largely determines whether the system recovers or collapses, while homophily and rewiring determine whether disagreement remains integrated or separates into p
arXiv:2607.06913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in public health applications, yet their robustness to non-clinical user inputs remains underexplored. We propose a domain specific robustness benchmark that evaluates LLMs under two perturbation types that commonly arise when non-clinical users interact with health AI systems: misinformation framing (MF), where prompt might be injected by false health claims, and layperson rewriting (LR), where patients describe symptoms in everyday language rather than medical terminology. Our goal is to evaluate the stability of LLMs under these perturbation. Experiments show that MF degrades accuracy by 7.2 pp on average with prediction flip rates of 9-38 percent, even when claims are explicitly labelled as unsupported; LR causes only 1.4 pp degradation. These findings highlight two distinct deployment risks in public health settings: models may produce incorrect outputs when users unintentionally
arXiv:2607.06784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of digital revolution many contemporary events that changed the world were shaped through the internet. Nowadays, the emergence of internet of things (IoT), combining physical objects with virtual networks is expected to have even more influence. This new 'decentralised' structure in the world raises questions such as power, governance and the notion of democracy online. The aim of this paper is to investigate these notions. We have taken the examples of Bitcoin and Wikipedia and examined their decision-making process. Our analysis has found some inconsistencies in their policies, that are in contradiction with democracy and consensus principles of governance. Starting from our findings, we present further improvements that can be used to achieve more democracy and equity in the digital context.
Article URL: https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepTutor Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703911 Points: 2 # Comments: 0
While nearly every industry is racing to integrate artificial intelligence, most schools are still teaching high school math the way it’s been done for decades--rooted in instructional material that is abstract, disconnected, and detached from the world students actually live in.
Article URL: https://www.edalex.com/news/edalex-rich-skill-descriptor-rsd-library-openrsd-integrated-new-muzzy-lane-release-ai-driven-skillbuild-platform/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698253 Points: 1 # Comments: 1
Teacher evaluations have been the subject of debate for decades. Breakthroughs have been attempted but rarely sustained. Researchers have learned that context, transparency, and autonomy matter.
SCHOOL SOFTWARE SCRUTINY: Legislators have pushed back against cellphones in the classroom but are now focused on ensuring school software on devices ...
Article URL: https://zenodo.org/records/20064618 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050336 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
For multilingual learners, language is not just a subject to be learned--it is the very medium through which they access the curriculum.
Three ways South Fayette Township School District brings their “Portrait of a Learner” to life.
Article URL: https://pagezero.ai Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825187 Points: 2 # Comments: 3
A revolution quietly underway in American education: the rise of homeschooling. In the past decade, there’s been a 61 percent increase in homeschool students across the United States, making it the fastest growing form of education in the country.
It's critical that schools create an environment where students thrive and teachers and staff feel supported and empowered.
Rather than replacing student thinking, when teachers design and guide AI experiences, the technology is most often used to deepen critical thinking and strengthen instruction
The recent Instructure/Canvas breach should be a wake-up call for every school and university relying on third-party platforms to power teaching and learning.
Community schools boost student success by connecting learning with mental health, family support, and local community resources. The post What If School Offered More? The Case for Community Schools appeared first on Getting Smart .
Despite the lack of grammatical capitalisation, ispring is a really useful teaching tool.
Tech & Learning has partnered with the Ed-Tech Leadership Collective to explore how market pressures are affecting districts' vendor choices
If you lead professional learning, whether as a school leader or PD facilitator, your goal is to make each session relevant, engaging, and lasting. AI can help you get there by streamlining prep, differentiating for diverse learners, combining follow-ups with accessibility for absentees, and turning feedback into actionable improvements.
K–12 school districts are packed with digital tools, and it’s up to IT leaders to manage the governance, data and risk associated with them. But no single department can do this alone and without all of the facts they need to make an informed decision. At ISTELive 2026 in Orlando, Fla., technology experts explained how cybersecurity, data privacy, accessibility and governance work together and why building a safe, intentional, student-centered digital environment depends on breaking down the silos between IT and the rest of the district. Cybersecurity Maturity Assessments Can Help Guide…
Earlier this year, U.S. senators convened to grill experts on how social media, smartphones and other technologies are affecting children’s mental health and learning. That conversation has since helped fuel a new wave of legislative action, with nearly a dozen states now considering screen-time restrictions for students. It’s an important debate. But from where I […]
A lawsuit alleges the U.S. Department of Education and the Office of Management and Budget are withholding the funds unlawfully.
The preliminary proposal comes as the Missouri school district has seen enrollment decline sharply by 58.5% in a 34-year period.
As the debate about screen time and digital tools in the classroom continues in school districts around the country, speakers at ISTELive 26 in Orlando, Fla., presented research noting that a balance between digital tools and foundational learning is the best path to effective learning. “This is not pro-tech versus anti-tech,” said Amanda Bollinger, associate administrator in the teaching and learning department at Jordan School District and a member of the Utah State Board of Education. “It’s just current reality. How do we balance those two things?” Cari Warnock, education…
This story was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of The 19th. Meet Nadra and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. To understand why five California families took their fight against segregated schools to court in the 1940s, picture the buildings reserved for their children’s learning. At that time in rural Orange […]
District leaders are under increasing pressure to improve science achievement while balancing competing priorities, staffing challenges, instructional demands, and accountability expectations.
Human Intelligence Labs: New Infrastructure for Learning in the Age of AI Elizabeth Redden Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Colleges need to invest in creating welcoming, AI-free learning spaces. Byline(s) Karen Spira
How Will We Look Back on This Moment in Higher Ed? sara.custer@in… Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Between historical revisionism and higher ed reform, this week speaks to the tensions in our country and marks a historical moment for the sector, one we’re still trying to understand. Byline(s) Sara Custer
New Presidents: Aspen Institute, Spelman, U at Buffalo, SUNY Brockport and More gianna.jakubowski Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Gianna Jakubowski
6 HBCUs Launch Course-Sharing Partnership Joshua.Bay Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM The new initiative lets students take classes across institutions without transferring or losing progress toward a degree. Byline(s) Joshua Bay
New AI Agents Pose ‘Existential Threat’ to How Grants Are Awarded sara.custer@in… Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM The rapid development of technology is outpacing any attempts to reform assessment systems, researchers warn. Byline(s) Seher Asaf for Times Higher Education
Your Kids in Your College? Readers Respond. Sara Brady Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM From the can’t-get-far-enough-away to the happy-at-home, readers’ experiences vary. Byline(s) Matt Reed
Virginia Wesleyan Officially Changes Name to Batten University Katherine Knott Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Katherine Knott
Mississippi Facing Financial Aid Shortfall Johanna Alonso Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Johanna Alonso
Colleges Reflect on 250 Years of American History, Warts and All kathryn.palmer… Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Higher education institutions are commemorating the nation’s founding by providing a forum for grappling with the uncomfortable and nuanced aspects of the American past. Byline(s) Kathryn Palmer
DA Launches Criminal Investigation of N.M. Highlands University Ryan Quinn Thu, 07/02/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Ryan Quinn
One analysis estimates that the policy could cost the 28-institution system $15 million a year in lost tuition and fee revenue.
The designation comes with an increased federal student loan cap of $200,000 for graduate programs.
arXiv:2606.13715v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed just 43% of tasks. We revisit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Fable 5, now completes 98%. Beyond this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, unintended harmful actions, such as emailing the wrong person, fell from 26% of tasks for GPT-4 to 1.9% for Claude Fable 5; capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed stable. Third, while several classes of error have been eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm. We release an updated version of the benchmark w
arXiv:2606.00684v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address the problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for target observations embedded in a subspace of the high dimensional data space. Using continuous normalizing flows (CNFs), we propose a Lagrangian sub-flow (LSF) framework designed to isolate and estimate the density for the relevant components in the representation and using the remaining components as context. Through experimentation with models for speech synthesis, we show that CNFs, similarly to other deep generative models (DGMs), are susceptible to the "likelihood paradox", where high likelihood is erroneously assigned to OOD samples. This is attributed to the inductive bias of DGMs that prioritize low-level structural details over high-level semantic coherence. To mitigate this phenomenon, we propose a number of geometric diagnostic signals based on the velocity field over the sub-flow trajectory. Based on these signals, we design metrics for the challengin