UTexas Offers a New Masters in AI

1-27-2023

January 27, 2023

⚡ Today’s Highlights

  • 🔑Unlock the potential of generative AI

  • 🎓University of Texas offering a Masters in AI

  • 💧Machine Learning to help fight drought

📰 Today's Top Stories

(10 min read) (Source: Forbes)

Many would agree that one of the main benefit of generative AI is the ability to quickly produce high-quality content with minimal human effort. It can help businesses by improving efficiency and reducing costs for content production as well as improving customer experiences, all while reducing the resources required to get the job done.

However, it continues to raise concerns about the usage of intellectual property and has led to several copyright infringement issues. For this reason, the demand for AI-specific legislation grows by the day. The EU's AI Act, which focuses on using AI for social scoring or biometric identification, has not yet passed, and there hasn't been much legislation addressing this incoming wave of AI-based tools. The more they're used the better AI tools get at generating content and understanding user prompts, and the more use cases for them emerge. This leaves us to wonder... who will adapt and who will be replaced? Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z.

(5 min read) (Source: Forbes)

Are you ready for the revolution? No?! Well then get up off the couch, wipe off the Dorito dust, and listen close. The University of Texas at Austin is teaming up with edX to bring you an online Master of Science degree in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI). UT Austin, a leading center for machine learning, has been partners with edX since 2012. And with the World Economic Forum declaring AI and machine learning to be one of the most in-demand and fastest-growing fields, now's the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon.

The program is currently priced competitively at $10,000 plus other fees. You'll learn all about machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Applications open in June 2023, with classes starting in January 2024 (pending approval by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board).

(5 min read) (Source: Penn State University)

The Colorado River basin, which supplies water to 40 million people in the Western United States, is facing a water crisis due to drought, climate change, and a growing population’s increasing water demand. Researchers from Penn State used survey data from 3,000 residents of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Denver to identify distinct groups of water consumers and their consumption behaviours using a machine learning algorithm. The analysis created a spectrum of users’ behaviours; from those who do not intend to change their consumption habits to people who are willing but lack the knowledge and resources.

The next step of the research is to use machine learning algorithms to model changes in water consumption behaviour and the subsequent impact on water availability. Using AI tools will help researchers understand patterns and behaviour more efficiently and model potential outcomes with more certainty to ensure effective behavioural changes to reduce water scarcity.

(6 min read) (Source: Penn State University)

Quitting smoking isn't just about willpower, it also has a lot to do with genetics. Researchers from Penn State College of Medicine and the University of Minnesota have used a machine learning model to identify drugs that could be repurposed to help people quit smoking. They found over 400 genes that play a role in smoking behaviour and identified eight potential medications, such as dextromethorphan and galantamine, that were found to be effective.

The problem is that the study's genetic data primarily consisted of people with European ancestry, and the model must be tailored to study data from other groups. The use of machine learning and AI in this type of research has the potential to make quitting smoking more effective by tailoring treatments to different groups, but it also highlights the need for proper regulation to ensure data privacy and ethical use.

💰 Funding Alerts:

  1. FIRST THINGS FIRST: Check out this report outlining and forecasting the global generative AI market’s size, shares, and industry trends for 2022-2028. The report claims that the market for generative AI is expected to reach $53.9 billion by 2028. Are we crazy for thinking that might be too low? Let us know what you think on Twitter.

  2. Encord has released Encord Active, a free open-source toolkit to improve training data quality and model performance. It helps bridge the "production gap" between research and real-world scenarios by allowing engineers to investigate data, labels, and model performance and prioritize high-value data for labelling. It is the first tool to provide end-to-end active learning workflows and is trusted by healthcare institutions like King's College London, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Stanford Medical Centre. Encord is backed by several venture capital firms. (Business Wire)

  3. In the midst of a pandemic, fraud detection systems were left confused and inefficiencies rose in supply chains and financial transactions. Enter Inscribe, an AI-powered document fraud detection service that uses millions of data points to check financial documents for fraud and generate individual customer risk profiles. It recently closed a $25 million funding round, bringing the total raised to a whopping $38 million. Looks like fraudsters better watch out, Inscribe's got your number. (TechCrunch)

  4. Outreach, a leading sales execution platform is announcing a new feature called Smart Email Assist, which uses AI technology to improve the efficiency of B2B salespeople.

  5. Supernormal is a company that creates meeting notes by connecting to video conferencing platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. Supernormal recently announced that it raised $10 million in a funding round, bringing the company's total raised to around $12.9 million. (TechCrunch) 

🦾 Popular Content:

1. Wholesome? Horrifying? A Reddit user was playing around with Midjourney and made a bit of both. All I know is that a fuzzy, terrier-sized pet spider doesn’t seem like such a bad thing now. (Reddit)

3. This Reddit user found some pretty clever ways to get Stable Diffusion to output some very specific requests. (Reddit)

4. Check out this discussion on Reddit, users are sharing their favourite and most powerful ChatGPT prompts. (Reddit)

5. Which type of generative AI will have the bigger commercial impact? Check out this poll and the discussion on Twitter. (Twitter)

6. What AI thinks Rome would look like if it had never fallen. The legions would ravage the lands in Call of Duty skins. (Twitter)

👀 More Reading:

  1. Check out these projections from June 2022. Given the job cuts happening in the tech sector and the break-neck speed with which AI tools are hitting the market, do you still think this is accurate or are we already going to be close to these numbers by end of 2023? (Insider Intelligence)

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