The UCLA Labor Center highlights female rickshaw operators who are organizing to transform their work and their lives in a traditionally male-dominated profession.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Spotify is introducing a new labeling system to better inform subscribers about AI-generated content on its platform. Spotify also plans to bar AI-labeled music from appearing in users' algorithmic mixes. Tiffany Naiman, director of music industry programs at UCLA, views this as a step in the right direction but is more interested in how Spotify will identify AI personas. “I want to know the process. How [will they] know the difference? Are there going to be [real] artists that get tied up in it?” she asked. Read more about UCLA in today’s New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine and others.
CNN Business reported on the correlation between AI’s historic investor surge and spikes in unemployment. Economist Ben Hyman, a senior researcher at the California Policy Lab at UCLA, said unemployment claims are rising in California “among workers who were formerly in highly AI-exposed occupations, especially those who are advanced-degree holders in the Bay Area and in technology-adjacent sectors.” A recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that unemployed people with advanced degrees are among the groups struggling the most to find a job. Read more about UCLA in today’s Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and others.
The Los Angeles Times reported on “Small Lots, Big Impacts,” an initiative spearheaded by UCLA’s cityLAB that is focused on transforming small, vacant, privately owned parcels of land in Los Angeles into thoughtfully designed “gentle density” housing — such as duplexes, fourplexes and townhome communities — to be sold at more reasonable prices than LA’s long-venerated single-family homes. UCLA’s Dana Cuff, director of cityLAB, and Emmanuel Proussaloglou were quoted. Read more about UCLA in the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC.
ScienceMag reported on a new five-year, $3.9 million National Cancer Institute grant awarded to UCLA’s Cristina Puig-Saus and her research team to develop new strategies to improve cancer immunotherapy. The researchers, based at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, have created a fast, large-scale drug-screening platform to identify compounds that help T cells better recognize and destroy cancer cells. The work initially focuses on melanoma, but the approach could be expanded to other cancers. Read more about UCLA in today’s Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and others.
The effects of stress, depression and inadequate healthcare in the county jail build up into lethal risk, a new study led by UCLA researchers has found.
In an Economic Times article about how Tesla’s ties to China could scuttle a Tesla–SpaceX merger, UCLA’s Christopher Tang, a professor at the Anderson School of Management who specializes in global supply chains, explained that a potential solution — a separate Tesla licensing deal with China — could carry its own regulatory risks. Ongoing technology transfers, such as software upgrades for self-driving, to a Chinese entity could run afoul of U.S. rules, he said. Read more about UCLA in the Los Angeles Times.
LAist reported on how rising street homelessness could influence Los Angeles’ 2026 mayoral race, as candidates debate the effectiveness of current strategies and the impact of recent funding cuts. Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said Mayor Karen Bass deserves credit for making homelessness a top priority but acknowledged she overpromised on how quickly people could be moved into housing. Yaroslavsky also cautioned that campaign pledges to dramatically reduce homelessness underestimate the complexity of the crisis. Read more about UCLA from Los Angeles Business Journal, CalMatters and others.
Los Angeles Magazine reported on the growing number of K–12 students receiving individualized education programs, or IEPs, in LA and nationwide, and the mounting strain on schools to provide special education services. UCLA human development and psychiatry professor Connie Kasari said the increase reflects better identification of those students who need support, greater parent advocacy and the lasting effects of COVID, while noting that many Latino families remain underserved because they are less likely to know about the resources or advocate for them. Read more about UCLA in today’s CNN International, Futurism and others.
