Artificial intelligence (AI) has already made its way into our personal and professional lives. Although the term is frequently used to describe a wide range of advanced computer processes, AI is best understood as a computer system or technological process that is capable of simulating human intelligence or learning to perform tasks and calculations and engage in decision-making.

Until recently, the traditional understanding of AI described machine learning (ML) technologies that recognized patterns and/or predicted behavior or preferences (also known as analytical AI). 

Recently, a different kind of AI is revolutionizing the creative process — generative artificial intelligence (GAI). GAI creates content — including images, video and text — from inputs such as text or audio.

For example, we created the image below using the text prompt “lawyers attempting to understand generative artificial intelligence” with DALL·E 2, a text-to-image GAI.

GAI proponents tout its tremendous promise as a creative and functional tool for an entire range of commercial and noncommercial purposes for industries and businesses of all stripes. This may include filmmakers, artists, Internet and digital service providers (ISPs and DSPs), celebrities and influencers, graphic designers and architects, consumers, advertisers and GAI companies themselves.

With that promise comes a number of legal implications. For example, what rights and permissions are implicated when a GAI user creates an expressive work based on inputs involving a celebrity’s name, a brand, artwork, and potentially obscene, defamatory or harassing material? What might the creator do with such a work, and how might such use impact the creator’s own legal rights and the rights of others?

This article considers questions like these and the existing legal frameworks relevant to GAI stakeholders.

Training sets and expressive outputs: Copyright, right of publicity and privacy considerations

GAIs, like other AI, learn from data training sets according to parameters set by the AI programmer. A text-to-image GAI — such as OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion — requires access to a massive library of images and text pairs to learn concepts and principles.

Similar to how humans learn to associate a blue sky with daytime, GAI learns this through data sets, then processes a photograph of a blue sky with the associated text “day” or “daytime.” From these training sets, GAIs quickly yield unique outputs (including images, videos or narrative text) that might take a human operator significantly more time to create.

For example, Stability AI has stated that its current GAI “model learns from principles, so the outputs are not direct replicas of any single piece.”

The starting data sets implementing software code and expressive outputs raise legal questions. These include important issues of copyright, trademark, right of publicity, privacy and expressive rights under the First Amendment.

Legal issues aplenty

For example, depending on how they are coded, these training sets may include copyrighted images that could be incorporated into the GAI’s process without the permission of the copyright owner — indeed, this is squarely at issue in a recently filed class action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.

Or they may include images or likenesses of celebrities, politicians or private figures used in ways that may violate those individuals’ right of publicity or privacy rights in the U.S. or abroad. Is allowing users to prompt a GAI to create an image “in the style” of someone permissible if it might dilute the market for that individual’s work? And what if GAIs render outputs that incorporate registered trademarks or suggest product endorsements? The numerous potential permutations of inputs and outputs supply rise to a diverse range of legal issues. 

Several leaders in GAI development have begun thinking about or implementing collaborative solutions to address these concerns. For example, OpenAI and Shutterstock recently announced a deal whereby OpenAI will pay for the use of stock images owned by Shutterstock, which in turn “will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models.” For its part, Shutterstock agreed to exclusively purchase GAI-generated content produced with OpenAI.

As another example, Stability AI has stated that it may allow creators to choose whether their images will be part of the GAI data sets in the future. 

Education essential

Other potential copyright risks include both claims against GAI users for direct infringement and against GAI platforms for secondary (contributory or vicarious) infringement. Whether or not such claims might succeed, copyright stakeholders are likely to be closely watching the GAI industry, and the novelty and complexity of the technology are sure to present issues of first impression for litigants and courts. 

Indeed, appropriately educating courts about how GAIs work in practice, the differences between GAI engines and the relevant terminology will be critical to litigating claims in this space. For example, the process of “diffusion” that is central to current GAIs typically includes deconstructing images and inputs and repeatedly refining, retooling and rebuilding pixels until a particular output sufficiently correlates to the prompts provided.

Given how the original inputs are broken down and reconstituted, one might even compare the diffusion process to the transformation a caterpillar undergoes in its chrysalis to become a butterfly. On the other hand, litigants challenging GAI platforms have asserted that “AI image generators are 21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists.”

When stakeholders, litigants, and courts understand the nuances of the processes involved, they will better be able to reach results that are consistent with the legal frameworks at play.

Is a GAI-created work a transformative fair use?

While some GAI platforms are taking steps to address concerns regarding the use of copyrighted material as inputs and their inclusion in and effect on creative outputs, the fair use doctrine will surely have a role to play for GAI stakeholders as both potential plaintiffs and defendants.

In particular, given the nature of GAI, questions about “transformativeness” are likely to predominate. The more a GAI “transforms” copyrighted images, text or other protected inputs, the more likely owners of GAI platforms and their users are to assert that the use of or reference to copyrighted material is a non-actionable fair use or protected by the First Amendment. 

The traditional four fair use factors will guide courts’ determinations of whether particular GAI-created works qualify for fair use protection. This includes the “purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature.” Also, “the nature of the underlying copyrighted work itself,” the “amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole,” and “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” (17 U.S.C. § 107). 

The fair use doctrine is currently before the Supreme Court in Andy Warhol Found. for Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 11 F.4th 26 (2d Cir. 2021), cert. granted, ___ U.S. ___, 142 S. Ct. 1412 (2022), and the Court’s ruling is highly likely to impact how stakeholders across creative industries (including GAI stakeholders) operate and whether constraints on the fair use framework around copyright will be loosened or tightened (or otherwise affected).

Lawsuits already; more to come

GAI platforms should also consider whether and to what extent the software itself is making a copy of a copyrighted image as part of the GAI process (“cache copying”), even if the output is a significantly transformed version of the inputs.

Doing so as part of the GAI process may supply rise to claims of infringement or might be protected as fair use. As usual, these legal questions are highly fact-dependent, but GAI platforms may be able to limit potential liability depending on how their GAI engines function in practice.

And indeed, on November 3, 2022, unnamed programmers filed a proposed class action complaint against GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly infringing protected software code via Copilot, their AI-based product meant to assist and speed the work done by software coders. In a press release issued in connection with the lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers stated, “As far as we know, this is the first class action case in the U.S. challenging the training and output of AI systems. It will not be the last. AI systems are not exempt from the law.” 

These attorneys fulfilled their prediction when they filed their next lawsuit (referenced above) in January 2023, asserting claims against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt, including for direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the DMCA and violation of California’s statutory and common law right of publicity. 

The named plaintiffs — three visual artists seeking to represent classes of artists and copyright owners — allege that the generated images “are based entirely on the training images [including their works] and are derivative works of the particular images Stable Diffusion draws from when assembling a given output. Ultimately, it is merely a complex collage tool.”

The defendants are sure to disagree with this characterization, and litigation over the specific technical details of the GAI software is likely to be front and center in this action.

Ownership and licensing of AI-generated content

Ownership of GAI-generated content and what the owner can do with such content raises additional legal issues. As between the GAI platform and the user, the details of ownership and usage rights are likely to be governed by GAI terms of service (TOS) agreements.

For this reason, GAI platforms should carefully consider the language of the TOS, what rights and permissions they purport to grant users, and whether and to what extent the platform can mitigate risk when users exploit content in a manner that might violate the TOS. Currently, TOS provisions regarding who is the owner of GAI output and what they can do with it may differ by platform.

For example, with Midjourney, the user owns the GAI-generated image. However, the company retains a broad perpetual, non-exclusive license to use the GAI-generated image and any text or images the user includes in prompts. However, terms are likely to change and evolve over time, including in reaction to the pace of technological development and ensuing legal developments,  

OpenAI’s current terms provide that “as between the parties and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you own all Input, and subject to your compliance with these Terms, OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output.”  

Questions of ownership front and center

As companies continue to consider who should own and control GAI content outputs, they will need to weigh considerations of creative flexibility against potential liabilities and harms, and terms and policies that may evolve over time.

Separate questions of permissible use arise for parties who have licensed content that may be included in training sets or GAI outputs. Such licenses — especially if created before GAI was a potential consideration by the parties to such license agreement — may supply rise to disputes or require renegotiations. The intent of parties to include all potential future technologies, including those unforeseen at the time of contracting, implicates additional legal issues relevant here.

While questions of ownership are front and center, one key player in the GAI process — the AI itself — is unlikely to qualify for ownership anytime soon. Despite the efforts of AI-rights activists, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Copyright Office and courts have been broadly in agreement that an AI (as a nonhuman author) cannot itself own the rights in a work the AI creates or facilitates.

This issue merits watching, however; Shira Perlmutter, register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office has indicated the intention to closely examine the AI space, including questions of authorship and generative AI. And a lawsuit challenging the denial of registration of an allegedly AI-authored work remains pending before a court in Washington D.C.

Political concerns and potential liability for immoral and illegal GAI-generated images

Apart from concerns of infringement, GAI raises issues about the potential creation and misuse of harmful, abusive or offensive content. Indeed, this has already occurred via the creation of deepfakes, including deep-faked nonconsensual pornography, violent imagery and political misinformation.

These potentially nefarious uses of the technology have caught the attention of lawmakers, including Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, who wrote a letter to the U.S. National Security Advisor and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to highlight the potential for misuse of “unsafe” GAIs and to call for the regulation of these AI models. In particular, Eshoo discussed the release of open-source GAIs, which present different liability issues because users can remove safety filters from the original GAI code. Without these guardrails — or a platform ensuring compliance with TOS standards — a user can leverage the technology to create violent, abusive, harassing or other offensive images. 

In view of the potential abuses and concerns around AI, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently issued its Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which is meant to “help guide the design, development and deployment of AI and other automated systems so that they protect the rights of the American public.” The Blueprint focuses on safety, algorithmic discrimination protections and data privacy, among other principles. In other words, the government is paying attention to the AI industry.

Given the potential for misuse of GAI and the potential for governmental regulation, more mainstream platforms have taken steps to implement mitigation measures.

AI is in its relative infancy, and as the industry expands, governmental regulators and lawmakers as well as litigants are likely to increasingly need to reckon with these technologies.

Nathaniel Bach is a litigation partner at Manatt Entertainment.

Eric Bergner is a partner and leader of Manatt’s Digital and Technology Transactions practice.

Andrea Del-Carmen Gonzalez is a litigation associate at Manatt Entertainment.

ChatGPT is getting all the attention as of late, but modern AI technologies have a range of use cases beyond finally making Bing useful. One emerging trend is putting AI to work to aid with the frustrating and laborious task of filing and auditing corporate expense reports. Today, Microsoft and American Express announced a deal that aims to do just that. The companies agreed to expand their decades-long partnership to build solutions that leverage Microsoft Cloud and AI technologies, starting with expense report management.

According to Amex, the initial solution will leverage machine learning and AI to automate expense reporting and approvals.

This goes beyond simply learning how to classify certain expenses, as many of today's tools already do. Instead, the new system will implement an AI-powered decision engine that understands the company's own travel and expense (T&E) policy and how it applies to submitted expenses. It will use that understanding along with other factors -- like the employee's purchase and payment history -- to categorize and assign a risk score to individual transactions.

To make this work, the employee will be prompted to snap a photo of their receipt after paying with their Corporate Amex card. The system will then apply one of three risk scores: red, yellow or green, based on whether the expense is recommended for automatic approval or not, or if it needs another look. This information is passed along to the company's expense management system with the receipt details attached to automatically generate reports for managers and auditors to use in their own decision-making. Amex says the AI is something it built in-house -- it's not leveraging Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, as Bing is, but is using Microsoft Cloud.

Over time, the expense management system will get smarter thanks to machine learning. As more expenses flow through the system, it will Improve its algorithms around what sort of expenses can be automatically approved.

Story continues

Microsoft will be the solution's first tester and will integrate it with its own internal expense system later in the year, American Express notes. Over time, it will roll out to more Amex Corporate clients and add support for more expense management tools.

While it's not exactly ChatGPT for expense reports, if successful, the solution could save time and reduce headaches around corporate expense management.

Imagine, instead of spending hours manually categorizing expenses, uploading receipts and justifying the charges, corporate employees would only have to focus on the outliers that actually required further explanation.

Of course, it remains to be seen if the solution is capable of actually accomplishing this goal, as described, or if corporations will even utilize the tech when it becomes available.

Amex also isn't the only company looking to AI to Improve the tedious processes around expense report management. Just days ago, Palo Alto-based business-travel software maker TripActions rebranded to Navan and announced it would integrate ChatGPT into its platform for similar reasons. The company said its new system would learn a user's preferred airlines, hotels and restaurants to build itineraries and will streamline expense reporting through its own receipt-scanning tool, among other things.

There's reason, of course, to be skeptical of these forthcoming AI solutions.

As The Atlantic recently pointed out, new technologies meant to reduce employee labor inevitably just create "new types of work" for people to do instead. And ChatGPT's way of confidently providing the wrong answer suggests some of that extra work may involve dealing with false positives and negatives.

Plus, other companies have been leveraging AI for some time, like SAP Concur. And many employees would argue that Concur isn't exactly a user-friendly system.

The timing of the announcement is suspect, as well. Amex is likely hoping to ride on the wave of interest in the Microsoft-OpenAI deal and the ChatGPT-powered Bing to get more eyeballs on its far less exciting use case. (Unless, of course, expense management thrills you!)

Still, AI is on its way to the broader financial services and corporate travel industry, not just expense management. In that respect, Amex isn't necessarily getting out ahead of the market, it's just keeping up with where it's headed.

CONTACT: ResearchAndMarkets.com 
         Laura Wood,Senior Press Manager 
         press@researchandmarkets.com
         For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 
         For U.S./ CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 
         For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 

© 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

© 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

In today’s economic times, the criticality of cost efficiency is at an all-time high. Organizations need high-quality guidance backed by products and services that help you achieve and maintain that efficiency. This is a large part of what we do today within the Cost Management team and the larger Commerce organization here at Microsoft. In that vein, we are excited to announce that Microsoft has joined the FinOps Foundation as a premier member and has joined the Governing Board defining the strategy and vision of the organization. Together, we can deliver unparalleled guidance and innovative solutions that empower organizations to increase efficiency and accelerate growth.

"I’m very enthusiastic about our partnership with the FinOps Foundation and our membership as part of the FinOps community. Optimizing cloud workloads is more important than ever for companies of all sizes in all industries. For Microsoft this collaboration with the FinOps Foundation and our industry partners will empower Microsoft Cloud customers and partners to leverage the cost management best practices and industry-standard operating procedures cultivated by the FinOps community." —Vivek Dalvi, Corporate Vice President, Commerce Platform and Experiences

What is the FinOps Foundation?

The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization hosted at the Linux Foundation dedicated to advancing people who practice the discipline of cloud financial management via best practices, education, and standards. The FinOps Foundation community is made up of practitioners around the world, including many of our valued Microsoft Cloud customers and partners. The FinOps Foundation hosts working groups and special interest groups covering Topics like cost and usage data standardization, containers and Kubernetes, and sustainability based on real-world stories and expertise from the community.

“Microsoft is a bellwether technology leader who is aligned to our vision of accelerating the growth of FinOps practitioners with its presence, leadership, and innovation. We welcome Microsoft as a Premier Member as its membership will be a huge asset to the larger FinOps community and development and maturation of best practices across industries and the world.” —JR Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation.

Microsoft and the FinOps Foundation

My colleague, Jimin Li, joined the Foundation Governing Board in January and we’ve already begun participating in working groups and special interest groups, but that’s just the beginning. As we look toward our future as part of the FinOps Foundation, we’re exploring five primary focus areas over the coming months:

Defining specifications and evolving best practices

We are excited to join the FinOps Foundation and our industry partners in defining, evangelizing, and implementing best practices and specifications like the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS). We’re already actively contributing to this program and looking forward to sharing our joint developments broadly.

Aligning our collective guidance

We offer a wealth of guidance from architecture documentation, like Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected Framework, to our products, like Microsoft Cost Management and Azure Advisor. While we tell the same underlying story as the FinOps Foundation, we believe the closer our guidance is aligned to the FinOps Framework, the easier it will be for individuals and organizations to understand and implement. As a first step, I’ve contributed to the second edition of the O’Reilly Cloud FinOps book.

Improving our products and services

Similar to how we plan to align our guidance, we see opportunities to align our products and services to the FinOps Framework while learning more about customer needs from the vibrant multicloud community of practitioners in the FinOps Foundation forums. We view this as an end-to-end experience for people and organizations to adopt and for many, that can sometimes start and end with the product itself. We aim to be good citizens in the community by contributing and listening.

Advancing training and certification programs

The FinOps Foundation offers several great training and certification programs, such as the FinOps Certified Practitioner and FinOps Certified Professional, geared towards helping people advance within their careers and growing the community at large. We look forward to working with the FinOps Foundation to Improve material specifically focused on the Microsoft Cloud and to certify relevant Microsoft teams in FinOps.

Fun fact: Microsoft has the largest number of FinOps Certified Professionals at any organization in the world!

Engaging with the community

I’ve mentioned the FinOps Foundation community several times now, but I’m not sure I’ve really done it justice. With over 8,700 members and growing rapidly, the community behind the FinOps Foundation is truly the driving force of the success of the organization. We are extremely enthusiastic about this opportunity to collaborate with and learn from this passionate community as we engage in various programs and initiatives, like the upcoming FinOps X conference where Microsoft is a platinum sponsor. The more we learn, the better we can support you and help you achieve more.

What’s next?

We’re looking forward to the many exciting opportunities ahead of us as we partner with FinOps Foundation, seeking to make cost management and optimization—or "FinOps"—easier to adopt and implement within the Microsoft Cloud. We only scratched the surface here, so stay tuned by following Cost Management updates over the coming months.

To learn more about FinOps Foundation and to participate in the community, please join us at finops.org or in person at FinOps X in June.

The new standard requiring all leases longer than 12 months to be recorded on balance sheets is now in effect for nonpublic companies with a fiscal year beginning after Dec. 15, 2021.

To implement the new standard, organizations must identify all leases and book them as liabilities and right-of-use assets, which will have significant impacts on the balance sheets of many organizations.

While this may sound daunting, don't worry! There are tips and tools to simplify implementing the new standard.

Learn what the new standard means for your business or clients

First comes understanding the basic concepts of the new standard.

The definition of a lease changed under ASC 842. Under the new definition, a contract contains a lease if it conveys the right to control an identified asset for a period of time in exchange for consideration. As a result, a contract may require lease accounting even if it isn't called a lease.

There are also key terms to know, starting with lease vs. nonlease components, lease liability and ROU asset (a lessee's right to use an asset over the course of a lease).

• Lease components are costs related to the right to use an identified asset, such as rent paid to use part of a building. Nonlease components may be associated with the asset but are not integral to its use, such as common-area maintenance (CAM) payments.
• Lease liability is fairly straightforward: the present value of remaining lease payments (the payments considered a lease component) over the lease term.
• ROU asset starts with the lease liability, adding initial direct costs paid and subtracting lease incentives received.

ASC 842 can have a significant impact on an organization's financial statements. For many organizations, the only lease might be office space that, as an operating lease, only passed through the income statement under the previous standard. This change impacts long-term assets, as well as both long- and short-term liabilities, so adding a large lease can also impact your debt covenants.
Identify the lease portfolio

This seems like common sense, but leases are rarely managed in a central department for many organizations. The best way to prepare is:

• Review your expense accounts for payments that potentially contain a lease.
• Determine if contracts contain embedded leases. (A free embedded lease identifier can help.)
• Abstract each lease contract.
• Identify data gaps and decisions required around important topics, like the reasonably certain lease term. For each contract, do you have an economic incentive to renew or terminate, if you have that option?

Policy elections: discount rates and materiality

Because the lease liability is the present value of future lease payments, you must know which discount rate to apply. While the standard requires using the rate implicit in the lease when readily determinable, this rate is rarely known.

Nonpublic companies then have the option of using an incremental borrowing rate or the risk-free rate, and this option can be made by asset class. The incremental borrowing rate is generally more difficult to calculate, but results in a lower lease liability and ROU asset. Organizations tend to use the incremental borrowing rate for their larger leases, like office and warehouse space, and the risk-free rate for smaller leases, like vehicles and photocopiers.

While materiality isn't a prescribed policy election, it is an important judgment decision.

The international standard on materiality states that any lease under $5,000 is immaterial. FASB specifically excluded a materiality limit, leaving materiality decisions up to you. When determining your approach to materiality for leases, consider the following points:

• Think about materiality as the full lease liability, not just the monthly payment amount.
• Adding leases to the balance sheet could have a material impact on day one. This could adversely affect your loan covenants and debt ratios, which could impact banking relationships if this isn't addressed with your bank before issuing your financial statements.
• Avoid dismissing certain classes of assets as immaterial before conducting an analysis. We know of one public company that had decided its vehicle leases couldn't be material and therefore did not include them in its lease accounting implementation process. A new controller reviewed the contracts and discovered they were material, resulting in an unwanted, but necessary financial statement correction.
• For organizations with many smaller leases, assess materiality both individually and in aggregate.
• Document materiality decisions for your CPA firm.

Documentation

Implementing the new lease standard requires numerous decisions that need to be documented and retained for reference by your CPA firm and your team in the future.

For individual leases, you have the agreement itself, any amendments, your reasoning for the lease term, lease classification and discount rate applied. Using a system that lets you store these documents as part of the lease record will save a lot of time in the long run.

For your organization, you need to make and document a number of policy elections. Using a policy election template can help guide you through the decisions you'll need to make related to policy elections and practical expedients.

Set up the right systems and tools

No matter how you track your leases, the following actions will streamline the implementation process.

• Set up a new group of GL accounts before implementing the new lease standard. When creating these accounts, know that ROU assets and long- and short-term lease liabilities for finance and operating leases should be recorded separately.
• Consider software to simplify workflow and assure calculation accuracy. If you have lease data in a spreadsheet already, make sure bulk imports are available.
• Lastly, review maintenance. Decisions that were previously decentralized now need to be communicated to accounting. That means lease modifications and new leases need to be properly conveyed in the future. Open these lines of communication right away because these habits can be difficult to change.

Evaluating transition leases

A transition lease is one that started before the initial application date of the new lease accounting standard, which is the first date as of which the new standard is applied in your financial statements. For fiscal years ending Dec. 31, 2022, the initial application date is likely Jan. 1, 2022.

The FASB provided practical expedients to simplify implementation for transition leases, which most organizations elect to use. Electing the practical expedients means:

• Contracts properly identified as leases under the previous standard don't have to be reassessed as leases under the new standard, including leases that expired during the year.
• Lease classifications for transition leases can carry forward from the old standard. An operating lease continues to be an operating lease, and a capital lease is now a finance lease.
• While the definition of an initial direct cost has changed, you don't need to reassess this for transition leases.

What can be done with existing balances from the old standard? This is one accounting standard change where you will almost never make an adjustment to equity. Instead, the deferred rent for an operating lease is netted to the beginning ROU asset for that operating lease. Similarly, capital lease assets and liabilities should be netted to the beginning ROU asset for what is now a finance lease.
Last but not least

Do not underestimate the time it takes to implement the new lease standard! Tools and expertise can help ease the burden of your transition. You are not in this alone!

Feb. 7—ELKHART — Concord High School is planning to withdraw their alternative education students from Merit.

Concord Community Schools is designing its own alternative education program.

"This is an issue that is near and dear to my heart," said CHS Principal Seth Molnar. "I've spent many years in alternative education, so I know the power and benefits of alternative education for certain students."

The Concord Alternative Learning Program, Molnar said, will focus on finding students that need it, a safe and productive learning environment with supports in a nontraditional school setting. The program would feature three hours of in-person material, followed by work-study or online programming.

Students may attend the program due to academic, behavioral, or circumstantial reasons. The program will heavily focus on social skills and academic interventions so that students who may wish to transition back to the traditional school setting or go on to complete post-secondary, career, or college experiences.

The CALP will be considered part of CHS, with accreditation under the high school's Indiana Dept. of Education status.

"What we've come to realize is that our high school building is a phenomenal building, and we offer many things for many students and we do great work and we achieve at a higher level, but for whatever reason — and there's a lot of reasons that this could fall into — some students need something extra," Molnar said. "They need an alternative to the traditional brick-and-mortar that Concord High School provides."

Molnar asserted that he doesn't want the alternative program viewed as the place where bad kids go.

"We're looking for an opportunity to find success for all our students," he said. "We don't want any student to drop out of high school."

The program would be accessible to students based on five criteria as identified by the IDOE. Students that are at risk of dropping out of high school, falling behind academically, need flexible learning to earn income as they support their families, are facing expulsion, or have behavioral problems are among those who may qualify. Intervention teams that already explore options for students in need would incorporate the alternative learning program into their list of available interventions.

Story continues

The program will be available to grades 9-12 initially but Molnar hopes the program can expand to allow for grades 6-8 in the future.

IDOE recommends a 15:1 student-teacher ratio which allows for more personalized interventions and the program would also feature trauma-informed practices.

"We need to make sure that we're addressing some of the reasons that they were placed in an alternative setting," Molnar said. "If it's just designed to get credit recovery or credits, we're not addressing the problem. We have the ultimate hope that in our alternative placement program, students could transition back to a traditional building... We want to be actively working on some of the issues, some of the choices they made in the first place that got them there, hopefully they could transition back, but if not, these are the students that are going to be entering our greater Elkhart community."

Molnar explained that most students who are placed in an alternative setting don't often move far from where they went to school.

"These are the kids that are going to be shopping next to us at Meijer," he said. "We need to make sure that we're building strong community members with them."

The program will begin next school year.

Molnar asserted that the program will be intentional about which students are sent to alternative education.

Other items to come before the board include:

—The board also approved Molnar's request to use certain extracurricular activities in place of fitness credits. CHS students will be permitted to use one semester of marching band class either a required Physical Education I/Physical Education II credit or an elective music credit, and students who complete an athletic season on a team may use season as a credit for either physical education course as well.

—CCS received a grant that is set to go toward major improvements at West Side Elementary School and South Side Elementary School. The federal Full Service Community Grant for $9.5 million will be distributed over the course of five years and is in partnership with Elkhart Community Schools.

CCS Assistant Superintendent of Educational Programming Lisa Kendall explained that the grant will support high-quality in- and out-of-school programming, family and community engagement, early childhood development, social health, nutrition, and mental health services, and transitions from elementary to intermediate schooling.

"There's quite a bit of planning that needs to take place," Kendall said.

Using the funding they will also hire two coordinators, one for each school, to oversee implementation. The hope is that the coordinators' positions will naturally fit into the schools' programming once systems are in place.

Dani Messick is the education and entertainment reporter for The Goshen News. She can be reached at dani.messick@goshennews.com or at 574-538-2065.

Microsoft Arabia, the strategic sponsor of the second edition of the world’s largest technology conference, “LEAP 23”, has announced that its participation in the conference held at the Riyadh Front Exhibition and Convention Center, in Riyadh was a major success. The conference took place from 6 to 9 February.

icrosoft showcased its technical solutions in four main areas: sustainability, cybersecurity, hybrid cloud, and accessibility, which directly contributed to supporting the Kingdom’s journey in digital transformation in line with the ambitious Vision 2030.

The company signed several strategic agreements during the conference, including the formation of the “Estidama Sustainability Council” to respond to the transformations of sustainable economies, with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the Research, Development and Innovation Development Authority to support the Kingdom’s commitment to implementing sustainable development goals.

In the areas of planning, infrastructure establishment, policy development, and investment, Microsoft Arabia also signed an agreement with Dallah Al-Baraka Holding Company, aimed at cooperating in strategic technical solutions, leveraging the power of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, services and solutions, business automation and cybersecurity, data analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and privacy solutions.

Microsoft also announced its intention to invest in a new cloud data center in Saudi Arabia to provide further investment in local infrastructure in response to increasing customer demand from local and international companies and public sector institutions for cloud services. The investment is part of the company’s continuous efforts to enable organizations to achieve digital transformation in accordance with the goals and vision of the Kingdom. 

The new data center will provide organizations and developers in the Kingdom and around the world access to highly flexible and scalable cloud services while meeting the security, privacy, and compliance needs of the data residents, which will enable organizations to digitally transform, participate in innovation and make an economic impact.

Microsoft’s participation in the exhibition came with 28 of its technical partners, with each showcasing their innovative solutions powered by Microsoft’s technology.

Eng. Thamer Alharbi, President of Microsoft Arabia, stressed the importance of participating in LEAP 23 and said: “Microsoft’s mission in enabling every person and organization on the planet to achieve more is what drives Microsoft constantly to work with many partners and governments in various fields in doing more with less.”

During the conference, Microsoft presented solutions to significant challenges faced by various sectors, demonstrating how “do more with less” has driven digital transformation in the Kingdom. Alharbi added that staying ahead of changing economic and societal conditions requires institutions to be proactive and embrace advanced technological solutions which offer flexibility, quality, increased efficiency, and cost savings.

Rayan Zahid, Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft Arabia, said: “Microsoft’s commitment to supporting and enabling the public and private sectors to do more with less will enable the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to advance technologically to new horizons in the domains of health, education, banking services, financial technology, automobiles, energy, and others.”

Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability and conservation of environmental resources led to the company’s pledge two years ago to become carbon negative by 2030, thus ensuring its contribution to the world’s biodiversity; in line with this commitment, its booth at the LEAP 23 conference was made entirely of sustainable materials.

And to emphasize its commitment to sustainability, Microsoft presented a range of new Surface devices; Surface Laptop 5 and Surface Studio 2+ were showcased beside Surface Pro and Surface Pro 9; both are powerful hybrid devices that offer the best of a laptop and cloud-supported tablet in one, while still being enjoyable for both work and leisure. The latest, more sustainable versions feature increased repairability compared with previous ones. The company also showcased all the products available in the EXPRO catalog.

Microsoft enriched the discussions of “Leap 23” conference through its six speakers who discussed Topics related to security, sustainability, hybrid cloud, and technological development.

-Ends-