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Boise State University is creating microelectronics education programs and ventures to boost semiconductor research, development and production in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. Theses efforts, and the investment from the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, willensure students are prepared to work with the technology that forms the foundation of everything from mobile phones to household appliances to defense systems.

Boise State University is excited to help advance the Pacific Northwest regions capacity in this microelectronics and semiconductor arena, said Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs John Buckwalter. This also provides new opportunities for students across Idaho and the region to pursue careers in STEM areas.

Boise State created an advisory board for the microelectronics effort composed of leaders from industry. The group will work with industry and government agencies at the local, state and federal levels to maximize educational, research and investment opportunities for the benefit of Idaho.

The board consists of Brian Shirley, Senior Vice President of DRAM and Emerging Memory Engineering at Micron Technology; Dean Klein, former Vice President of Memory System Development at Micron Technology; Jay Hawkins, Director for the Micron Technology Foundation; and Mark Tuttle, former Corporate Vice President of Package Technology Development at Micron Technology.

The guidence of the board will help Boise State mobilize a university-wide effort to prepare students in Idaho for careers in microelectronics and also advance the vital research of faculty and students at the university.

Our coordination of efforts will accelerate the Boise State College of Engineerings ability to educate our engineers and computer scientists, to meet the needs of an increased workforce in our local semiconductor industries, said College of Engineering Dean JoAnn S. Lighty.

The interdisciplinary nature of microelectronics requires an approach which allows students to embed microelectronic education into their course of study regardless of career, college or major. Currently, the university effort includes the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Business and Economics and the College of Education.

-by Jamie Fink

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Boise State creates advisory board to advance microelectronics ... - Boise State University

Beau Benoit, Circulation & Marketing DirectorApril 3, 2023

Computer science students tried to beat the clock Friday in the annual Computer Programming Contest hosted by the Association for Computer Machinery and sponsored by Praeses, LLC.

Tasked with completing the greatest number of problems, students programmed solutions over four hours. Those with the most solutions in the shortest time received gift cards of $25 for third place, $50 for second and $100 for first.

Contestants competed in two divisions: freshman to sophomore and junior to senior.

Junior Ashamsa Adhikari took home first place in the junior and senior category. She explained what its like to win in such a male-dominated field.

When I was younger, I barely heard of someone who was a woman and in computer science, Adhikari said. There are more men in my field, but the number of women is growing exponentially. Now I have classmates who are women and in computer science too.

Despite the pressing time constraints, Adhikari persevered.

It was very stressful, but my programs were working. I got through, Adhikari said.

For everyone, the competition put their skills to the test. For some, it pushed them to their limits. Freshman Swoyam Thapa managed to conquer the code and exit $100 richer after winning first place.

It was stressful, Thapa said. I was shaking while typing, and my hands are still shaking.

Thapa said he plans to attend more programming contests in the future. In doing so, he said he wants to be more efficient and get even faster.

In computer science, its how long it takes for you to run your program, Thapa said. I want to make the run time shorter if possible.

Aside from a fun event, the contest provided real-world experience. One contestant, senior Olivia Howard, related this competition to the hiring process at certain businesses.

Theres this website called Hacker Ranked that a lot of companies use to assess people and their skills in coding, Howard said. A lot of the certifications happen within a time limit, and you have to solve certain problems.

After graduating, Howard said she plans to be a software engineer. She mentioned how contests like this have helped to brainstorm different ways around a problem and find quick solutions.

Professor of Computer Science Jose Cordova described the contest as an all-hands-on-deck event. Faculty members from the entire department helped to make the event come together.

Cordova explained that some faculty ran the administrative side of the competition while others judged submissions as they were submitted.

There were also faculty members present in the room during the contest to ensure all students followed the event rules.

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Competition rewards students for coding skills The Hawkeye - The HawkEye

The Smart Cities MIAMI 2023 Conference, co-hosted by the University of Miami School of Architecture and the Institute for Data Science and Computing, partnered with the Climate Resilience Academy and Double C to discuss the impacts of climate change and its related stressors on South Florida.

Scientists, architects, and engineers, as well as leaders from government and business, came together last week at the University of Miami to discuss how they will use the influx of data coming from technology tools to better prepare local cities and towns for the impacts of climate change.

They were on the Coral Gables Campus for the sixth annual Smart Cities conference hosted by the University of Miamis School of Architecture and Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC). This year, Smart Cities also partnered with the Universitys Climate Resilience Academy, which launched last spring to foster new solutions to climate change.

The two-day conference featured lectures and panel discussions with experts in academia, government, and private industry who focus on climate resilience, primarily in the fields of architecture, engineering, and climate science. Most discussions explored how technology can help cities and counties improve their efficiency in the face of climate impacts, including a keynote address from Ben Kirtman, a climate scientist and professor of atmospheric science at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. In a panel about resilient ideas in technology, Yelena Yesha, a computer science professor, Knight chair in data science and artificial intelligence, and IDSCs innovation officer, spoke about the critical information that can be gleaned from data gathered in existing smart cities. Later Thursday, other panels highlighted climate innovations happening at Florida Power & Light, as well as in the City of Coral Gables, in Miami-Dade Countys transportation department, and in the Village of Key Biscayne.

We need real time information to prepare for all types of catastrophic events, said Yesha, who created the National Science Foundation Center for Accelerated Real-Time Analytics six years ago. Every crisis is an opportunity, and its our opportunity at the University of Miami to adapt to this environment and take it to the next level of computing.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava echoed Yesha. Levine Cava said that she is trying to seize upon the opportunities to improve South Floridas resilience, and to sustain its appeal to tourists by working to keep Biscayne Bay clean, supporting climate-focused innovation, and keeping an eye on equity, so that all residents can adapt to the warming temperatures and rising seas as safely as possible.

Particularly in Miami-Dade, the environment is our economy, she said. People are coming for the weather, the food, and our dynamism, but they are also coming for our national parks, for Biscayne Bay and our pristine environmentand thats why it is so critical that we continue to invest, address, maintain, and protect that.

In addition to a recent rapid population increase, Levine Cava and others mentioned the local technology boom. To harness the intellectual power of those flocking here, Levine Cava said, the county recently created a nonprofit called the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority to offer seed funding to businesses and academic institutions to scale up their ideas to improve the local environment.

We hope this nonprofit will work alongside government to solve these pressing problems with technological solutions, she said. Through this mechanism, we are looking for more places where we can partner with smart people, doing smart things to create smart solutions for our environment.

On Friday, Andrew Kudless, the Bill Kendall Memorial Endowed Professor at the University of Houston and the director of the construction robotics and fabrication technologies lab, delivered the closing keynote speech. His address, titled Five Points of Architecture and AI, focused on the early design phase and how technology is affecting that.

The five points Kudless discussed were: the challenging of bias; the cultivation of sensibility; the crisis of labor; the redefinition of authorship; and the freedom of incoherence. He explained how his personal approach to his design process has evolved as more and more artificial intelligent technologies become widely available.

As a designer, one of the things I learned from a series of projects is to give up control to these other forces, said Kudless, who works under the moniker, Matsys Design. I can create things that are beyond my inability. I find it more productive to think that I am the co-author with my tools.

Caterina Cafferata, a Miami native and second-year architecture graduate student, said Kudless keynote was eye-opening to her.

I feel like AI is something thats being introduced more and more in architecture and other areas of study, and I thought it was really interesting to hear from someone who has their own firm and is implementing it in their own work, said Cafferata.

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Experts discuss cutting-edge technology and research at annual ... - University of Miami: News@theU

An attendee interacts with the AI-powered Microsoft Bing search engine and Edge browser during an event at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023. Microsoft unveiled new versions of its Bing internet-search engine and Edge browser powered by the newest technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images

As a venture capitalist, Jim Breyer has invested in many breakthrough technology ideas in recent decades, names we all know and interact with on a daily basis like Meta and Spotify. But the biggest one of all may be next, he says, through the combination of artificial intelligence and branches of science involved in medicine.

Since 2017, Breyer says his No. 1 task as a venture investor has focused on finding the best disease and medical data from leading research hospitals such as Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, and Johns Hopkins highly proprietary, significant data to license into startups Breyer Capital is backing.

"AI and medicine is perhaps the most attractive new investment opportunity I've ever seen," Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, said at last week's CNBC Healthy Returns virtual summit.

Breyer says he is not alone among tech leaders holding this view, citing a fireside chat he recently conducted with Michael Dell, during which the PC pioneer agreed, and private conversations he has had with tech CEOs. "Over the last 12 months, mega-cap companies, based on direct meetings with Satya [Nadella, Microsoft CEO] and Tim Cook [Apple CEO] and others are not just doubling, tripling down on health care and medicine, it's 10x, 50x," Breyer said.

But the opportunity won't translate into achievement without a new form of collaboration between the classic big tech talent and the medical field.

"Bringing together the brilliant 32 or 35-year-old machine learning people out of Amazon or Google or Microsoft and having them work closely with Nobel-winning doctors and great hospitals and great medical specialists is really challenging, but that's where breakthrough investment returns will be in both public and private companies," Breyer said.

Dr. Sanjiv Patel, president &CEO of Relay Therapeutics, which works at the intersection of new experimental techniques for drug discovery and computational science, says unlike the "false dawns" over the past few decades, it is for real this time. "It's no longer science fiction, we have three in clinical trials," Patel said.

But he cautioned that change will face many obstacles and an uncertain timeline. "There is a lot of hype. People say you push a button in the metaverse and get a life-changing medicine, and I just don't think were there," Patel said. "We are looking at incremental change over time ... and there are some significant challenges to overcome."

Some of those challenges will be case-specific as AI attempts to transform healthcare across the entire value chain; some will relate to the general problem of high quality, clean data sets "that's not easy to get," he says; and a third will be the bridging of the scientific talents cited by Breyer.

"The availability of bilingual scientists is going to be a rate limitation for us," Patel said, defining this as scientists well versed in computation research and one of the core sciences important to medicine physics, biology or chemistry. "That's a big one," he said.

All knowledge industry workers should assume they will need AI technology and remain open-minded about its use, says Dr. Vineeta Agarwala, Andreessen Horowitzgeneral partner. One of her portfolio companies, Insitro, was founded by Stanford AI researcher Daphne Koller (Koller co-founder edtech company Coursera). She cited an example Koller has been using of workers 30 years ago who said they didn't need personal computing technology when it was becoming more mainstream. "It would have been crazy for the knowledge industries to say 'We're okay. We're doing okay the way we are,'" Agarwala said at CNBC Healthy Returns.

Her VC is "on the prowl," she says, for founders who say they want to use AI to augment what they can do, so they can do more. "That's how we look at it, the companies and the researchers and the entrepreneurs," Agarwala said. "Embracing AI should look a little like those that embraced computers a few decades ago ... it will be inconceivable in the future to not be embracing this."

Unlike the evolution of the PC, which took three decades, she expects in the case of AI this will be "obvious" within five to ten years.

As a doctor, Agarwala says the amount of medical information she needs to stay on top of is already at "fever pitch," from medical literature to clinical trials and learnings from large sets of patient data. And she noted Microsoft already has integrated ChatGPT with its medical dictation software for doctors. These kinds of AI bridges will help with immediate workflow issues which contribute to physician burnout. "Just in the workflow of seeing patients and interfacing with the payer ecosystem, there may be a way for large language models to contribute to a reduction in burnout," she said.

After that, comes the "real biology," she says.

Already, AI is being applied to make better decisions for medicinal chemistry teams to pick better molecules or predict in advance toxicity of certain molecules, and over the next five to 10 years, expect talent that chooses to use AI to augment their role to have this "super power," Agarwala said.

"It's not can AI do what a human expert is doing but relentless focus on where AI can give me insight no human could have had," she said. "There is lots of exciting big talent opportunities coming from big tech and big cap pharma," she said. "Both need to come together to create companies."

Cloud services run by big tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon (Amazon Web Services) will be beneficiaries in the immediate years ahead, but for workers already at these companies which have made steep job cuts over the past year, including some job cuts reaching nascent health science efforts Breyer is focused on the mid-career talent that see where AI and medicine are going together.

"The single biggest challenge, day to day, week to week, for me is to bring the interdisciplinary individuals and teams together ... biotech, computation, specialized chemistry ... and have them all working together," Breyer said.

"The talent I see are the 30 to 35-year-old alumni of these companies, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, that want to go into this field on a mission, either through personal family history or view of the opportunity, this is where they want to spend the rest of their careers," Breyer said. "And rarely have I seen the 10-year alums of these mega caps saying this."

As Breyer goes out to speak with the next generation of professionals, students at schools including UT Austin, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, his message is clear: "This is the single biggest opportunity I've seen. However, make sure you are studying linear algebra and computation and chemistry and biology, because all of the fundamental opportunities are about these technologies that sit at the intersection of computation and science."

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The next big thing in Big Tech career path is an AI-based 'bilingual' job skillset - CNBC

At the University of Idaho (U of I), passion sparks real impact. As an institution, the university pioneered a research-driven and innovative approach to delivering lessons in engineering, computer science and cybersecurity. Today, students at U of I are spearheading breakthroughs in their respective fields.

Christopher Bitikofers innovation aptly represents the universitys engineering prowess. The mechanical engineering Ph.D. graduate worked with a team of students and faculty members to develop a complex robotics exoskeleton used in therapeutic medicine.

The exoskeleton mimics a human arms movement and abilities to help stroke survivors regain mobility. It focuses on two areas of motion the elbow and forearm. Currently, Providence St. Lukes Rehabilitation Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, is testing this exoskeleton with its patients.

Bitikofers visions came to be at the Assistive Robotics Lab, a state-of-the-art, hands-on learning space where engineering students develop robotic devices that evaluate neurological impairment, gather data to refine therapeutic medicine, and exponentially improve treatment for the greater good.

Using my engineering degree to make positive change, this is one of the most effective ways for me to spend my time, said the mechanical engineering PhD graduate. Working alongside physical therapists and hospital staff and developing these devices, were helping people improve their independence.

Bitikofers work proves that opportunities abound for anyone who pursues engineering at U of I, and undergraduates are no exception. At its core, the B.S. Mechanical Engineering teaches students to apply their maths, science, and engineering knowledge to research, design, and test devices or processes.

The program is one of many in the College of Engineering that unlocks exceptional learning, training, and research experiences. For 130 years, the division has provided just that and more through its departments: Chemical and Biological Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Nuclear Engineering & Industrial Management.

With over a century of experience, the college and its departments remain relevant in the modern age by adapting its offerings to tackle new global problems. For example, U of Is College of Engineering recently launched Idahos first undergraduate degree program in cybersecurity.

With the B.S. Cybersecurity, aspiring cybersecurity professionals gain a better understanding of how to deal with cybersecurity threats through simulation. The Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) connected to a local control hub in the Integrated Research and Innovation Center can simulate any modern high-voltage power grid configuration. With this, students can mimic control operations and simulate what a cyberattack might look like.

Undergraduate students can pursue Biological Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, Cybersecurity and more. Source: University of Idaho

Sydney Petrehn, a computer science major, worked as a Premier College Intern for the Air Force Civilian Service alongside senior leaders across the United States and Europe.

It was awesome, she enthuses. The University of Idaho has so many opportunities for students to explore and really immerse themselves in the field. I guarantee you can find something that will help you feel confident and empowered in your ability and understanding of cybersecurity-related topics at U of Idaho. The opportunities are endless.

The College of Engineering guarantees experiential learning through its interdisciplinary Senior Capstone Design Program nationally recognized by the Academy of Engineering for infusing real-world experiences into engineering education. Students work on creative projects. Industry partners, private industry, or departments at the university sponsor these projects. It culminates with the Engineering Design EXPO, a longest-running student engineering innovation showcase in the Pacific Northwest.

Cooperative Education (co-op) opportunities are available as well for those keen on alternating semesters of academic study with terms of full-time paid employment in positions that boost professional and personal development. In the process, students can earn up to $20,000 US Dollars in the process.

Thats not all. Students can benefit from one-on-one mentorship and personalised learning experiences with a prolific faculty. Picture engaging with University Distinguished Professor Dr. Jim Alves-Foss, who is one of two members leading the cybersecurity program, has published over 125 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers, primarily in the field of cybersecurity.

Likewise, University Distinguished Professor Dr. Brian Johnson is a registered professional engineer in Wisconsin and Idaho. His research interest focuses on power system protection, power quality, superconductivity applications in transmission and distribution, energy storage systems, real-time simulation of traffic systems, and intelligent transportation systems.

Its clear why U of I is the No. 1 Best Value Public University in the West, according to U.S. News and World Report. They are also the only public university in Idaho to be ranked best value by Forbes, Money, and The Princeton Review.

So what are you waiting for? If you are ready to define your future at the College of Engineering, click here to learn more today.Follow the University of Idahos College of Engineering on Facebook and Instagram

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University of Idaho: Preparing students for the 21st century - Study International News