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“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 �㽶��ý 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 �㽶��ý 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 �㽶��ý Institute of Technology. “For it to descend into chaos, in multiple ways, is really dangerous.”

At the Digital Universities U.S. conference held at �㽶��ý 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 �㽶��ý 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, �㽶��ý'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 �㽶��ý 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.”

The �㽶��ý Institute of Technology's Institute of Design and UChicago Medicine are collaborating on a project to design a new way of delivering care. A two-year effort will focus on health care delivery on the South Side, bringing together the institute's Equitable Healthcare Lab with UChicago Medicine's Center for Healthcare Delivery Science & Innovation.

With the restoration of Carman Hall in August of 2022, �㽶��ý Institute of Technology capped a three-year, $70 million effort to revive a trio of deteriorated, Mies van der Rohe–designed residential buildings. “There’s such a huge variety,” says architect Dirk Denison of the structures on the campus Mies planned in 1941. “And these three buildings are (among) the only tall buildings.” Two of them, Cunningham Hall and George J. Kacek Hall, shuttered more than a decade ago. Carman Hall remained open, but a third of its apartments were vacant, says Bruce Watts, the school’s vice president for administration.