Take a look at our May 3rd, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.
AI for Greener Cities: Tackling the Low-Hanging Fruit of Climate Change
The Ken Kennedy Institute | Medium Article
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing a diversity of sectors before our eyes. From more efficient healthcare to helping researchers unravel some of physics’ greatest mysteries, AI is used to create digital tools for solving complex problems. But how will AI help society to tackle one of our most existential challenges yet — climate change?
Though AI applications for combating climate change have so far received less funding and focus than more commercially-oriented applications in marketing, finance, and healthcare, the tide is turning (or, more precisely, the sea levels are rising). Governments, tech companies and investors are turning their sights toward the growing climate change AI sector.
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Machine Question Answering in the Wild
Eunsol Choi | May 9, 2022 | 4:00 - 5:00pm CST | McMurtry Auditorium in Duncan Hall
Recent large-scale language models provide dramatically improved representations of text that we can adapt easily for a wide range of tasks. Encouraged by their success, we now simulate end applications more closely, embracing world knowledge into the task definition. For example, while prior QA benchmarks provided an evidence document that contains a short answer to the question, we now expect models to generate an answer from the question alone. I will discuss new challenges that arise in these more realistic scenarios. First, models need to handle queries where the answer varies based on their temporal or geographical contexts (e.g., who is the vice president?). Second, models need to organize information to craft multi-sentence answers to address complex questions like “why do birds chirp more in the morning?”. Our results suggest that existing models struggle in both dimensions, despite their high automatic lexical match scores. In the final part of the talk, I will present preliminary work and directions for improving QA models in these challenging scenarios.
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This lecture will be live streamed as well as recorded. The recording will be posted on The Ken Kennedy Institute YouTube page.
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Future of Health Panel
Panel | May 12, 2022 | 2:00 - 3:30pm CST | The Ion
Angela Wilkins, Executive Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, and Ashutosh Sabharwal, Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Director Scalable Health Labs at Rice University will be serving on the Future of Health Panel at the Activation Festival.
The Future of Health is patient centric experience that is digitally connected, data driven, and focused on wellness. Join our energetic panel for a dynamic conversation on the technology and trends that are disrupting healthcare as we know it and shaping the future of global health. Overnight digital patient centric experience has become the central focus for hospitals, health care providers and health plans, and this is an emerging market disruptor. COVID-19 accelerated this digital transformation, and pace of change will continue well into the future.
Panelists include:
- Angela Wilkins, Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute, Rice University (Moderator)
- Ashutosh Sabharwal, Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Director Scalable Health Labs, Rice University
- Murat Uralkan, Director of Innovation, Houston Methodist
- Tatiana Fofanova, Co-Founder / CEO, Koda Health
- Emma Fauss, CEO, Medical Informatics Corp
- Jennifer Jones, Certified Integrative Nutritionist & Executive Wellness Coach, JENuine Nutrition
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2022 Machine Learning Boot Camp: Executives & Beginners
May 19-20, 2022 | 8:00am - 5:00pm CST | BRC at Rice University
This two-day boot camp will provide a broad introduction to Machine Learning (ML) for executives and beginners. Our goal is to give a manager or a CEO in a field such as medicine, finance, manufacturing, or energy an introduction to the essential concepts behind Machine Learning. Additionally, this boot camp is great for non-practicing beginners looking to learn. Taught by a team of Rice professors in the computational sciences, the Machine Learning Boot Camp will integrate lectures describing the basic concepts to state-of-the-art Machine Learning.
The boot camp assumes no specific prerequisites and will highlight a broad set of concepts, ranging from classical supervised (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression and decision trees) and unsupervised methods (e.g., clustering algorithms, principal components analysis) to modern machine learning approaches (e.g., different neural network architectures, min-max games and generative models, deep reinforcement learning), with numerous case studies and applications. Throughout its duration, the workshop will provide practical suggestions to executives with DOs and DON’Ts when using Machine Learning in practice.
Prerequisites: A general level of familiarity with mathematics is assumed, including college-level calculus, though those without this background will still find the boot camp a useful introduction to modern ML.
Click here to see the full 2022 curriculum.
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GCC AI in Healthcare Symposium
May 18, 2022 | 9:00am-3:45pm CST | Virtual
Please visit here to view full agenda and speaker line up. Register here.  
META Request for Research Proposals
Meta Research has RFP requests for university researcher consideration.
- 2022 Meta Security
- Focus Areas: Program analysis (for security), System and hardware security, Applied cryptography, Intrusion detection, forensics, and incident response, Usable security and human-centered design, App attestation
- Award Opportunity: 4–6 awards, each in the $65,000–100,000 USD range
- Deadline: May 11
- > Learn More
- 2022 Towards Trustworthy Products in AR, VR, and Smart Devices
- Focus Areas: 2022 Towards Trustworthy Products in AR,Applications such as AR and wearables, VR products, other AR/VR form-factors, smart-device social products, consumer and enterprise use casesVR, and Smart Devices
- Award Opportunity: 8–11 awards are available, up to $75,000 USD each
- Deadline: May 11
- > Learn More
- 2022 Networking RFPs: Network for AI
- Focus Areas: Hardware computational offloading for AI workload, End-to-end novel transport designs for distributed AI training, Scheduling, resource allocation, communication collectives and network joint optimization, New network interconnect architectures for AI training and inference
- Award Opportunity: Up to 6 awards, each in the $50,000 USD range
- Deadline: May 23
- > Learn More
- 2022 Systems Research
- Focus Areas: Fundamental challenges that arise in distributed systems operating at a large scale. Ex. Infrastructure control planes, Service abstractions and efficiency, Global service management
- Award Opportunity: Up to 6 awards, each in the $50,000 USD range
- Deadline: June 12
- > Learn More
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