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Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans?

Thats the conclusion of a group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables such as Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak who are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks.

Their petition published Wednesday is a response to San Francisco start-up OpenAIs recent release of GPT-4, a more advanced successor to its widely-used AI chatbot ChatGPT that helped spark a race among tech giants Microsoft and Google to unveil similar applications.

What do they say?

The letter warns that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity from flooding the internet with disinformation and automating away jobs to more catastrophic future risks out of the realms of science fiction.

It says recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one not even their creators can understand, predict, or reliably control.

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, the letter says. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

A number of governments are already working to regulate high-risk AI tools. The United Kingdom released a paper Wednesday outlining its approach, which it said will avoid heavy-handed legislation which could stifle innovation. Lawmakers in the 27-nation European Union have been negotiating passage of sweeping AI rules.

Who signed it?

The petition was organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which says confirmed signatories include the Turing Award-winning AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and other leading AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus. Others who joined include Wozniak, former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a science-oriented advocacy group known for its warnings against humanity-ending nuclear war.

Musk, who runs Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX and was an OpenAI cofounder and early investor, has long expressed concerns about AIs existential risks. A more surprising inclusion is Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, maker of the AI image generator Stable Diffusion that partners with Amazon and competes with OpenAIs similar generator known as DALL-E.

Whats the response?

OpenAI, Microsoft and Google didnt respond to requests for comment Wednesday, but the letter already has plenty of skeptics.

A pause is a good idea, but the letter is vague and doesnt take the regulatory problems seriously, says James Grimmelmann, a Cornell University professor of digital and information law. It is also deeply hypocritical for Elon Musk to sign on given how hard Tesla has fought against accountability for the defective AI in its self-driving cars.

Is this AI hysteria?

While the letter raises the specter of nefarious AI far more intelligent than what actually exists, its not superhuman AI that some who signed on are worried about. While impressive, a tool such as ChatGPT is simply a text generator that makes predictions about what words would answer the prompt it was given based on what its learned from ingesting huge troves of written works.

Gary Marcus, a New York University professor emeritus who signed the letter, said in a blog post that he disagrees with others who are worried about the near-term prospect of intelligent machines so smart they can self-improve themselves beyond humanitys control. What hes more worried about is mediocre AI thats widely deployed, including by criminals or terrorists to trick people or spread dangerous misinformation.

Current technology already poses enormous risks that we are ill-prepared for, Marcus wrote. With future technology, things could well get worse.

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Elon Musk and prominent computer scientists call for a halt to the AI race sparked by ChatGPT - The Philadelphia Inquirer

The world of internships can be difficult. I was fortunate enough to land one here just around a year ago, allowing me to earn college credit doing something that I really truly enjoyed. At the end of the day, though, it seems like the best way to land an internship is to find a way to truly stand out, and I think this guy spotted at Palisades Tahoe is absolutely killing it.

I would argue theres a good chance that Palisades has plenty of people who would be willing to take this guys resume or just straight up interview him on the lift. Its smart andits pretty darn funny, so it at least fits the energy of the Pain McShlonkey Classic.I dont know, maybe Im being silly, but if I was in charge of hiring, Id at least hear him out.

Maybe this is the future of job applications. Maybe anyone whos looking for a job should start skiing with their resume taped to their back, or maybe we should all be doing it, just in case.

Featured Image Credit: u/SOSharkie via Reddit

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Kid Finds Genius Way To Apply For Computer Science Internships - Unofficial Networks

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (March 30, 2023) Representatives from luxury jewelry designer Tiffany & Co. and fashion agency Harlems Fashion Row are making a historic visit to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State Universitys fashion merchandising and design program as part of an ongoing partnership to open opportunities for diverse students and build connections in the fashion world.

Representatives from Tiffany & Co., part of the luxury-goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, and Harlems Fashion Row CEO and founder Brandice Daniel will make their inaugural visit to N.C. A&Ts campus to take part in a career panel discussion Friday, March 31.

While on campus, the representatives will also view the accomplishments of the graduating class and its body of work in a student showcase in Benbow Hall.

Collaboration and partnership between industry leaders like Tiffany & Co. can open doors of opportunity and build bridges in the fashion world, said Daniel. Im excited to be part of this ongoing initiative to promote diversity and inclusion and help students achieve their dreams in the fashion industry.

In June 2022, Tiffany & Co. and Harlems Fashion Row announced a yearlong collaboration with A&Ts fashion program, part of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES), for a 10-week lecture series called Tenacity Talks.

For the past year, we have been virtually communicating with Tiffany & Co. and Harlems Fashion Row through the weekly Tenacity Talk sessions, said associate professor Devona Dixon, Ph.D., who leads the lecture series. Their visit will allow students to engage and communicate freely without the barriers of Zoom.

In April 2022, Felita Harris, chief strategy and revenue officer for HFR/ICON360 (the nonprofit arm of Harlems Fashion Row), was a featured guest and keynote speaker for the programs spring student showcase and a runway show, hosted by student organization Fashion X-cetera.

In November, A&Ts fashion program received a $100,000 award from Gap Inc. and ICON 360 for a second consecutive year as part of the clothier and nonprofits Closing the Gap initiative.

N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University won this $100,000 award because of their impressive application, said Daniel in 2022. We saw that they have been doing well with their existing resources and were convinced that they will be good stewards and use the grant to advance their fashion program further.

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Luxury Jeweler Tiffany & Co. Makes First Visit to N.C. A&T on March 31 - North Carolina A&T

3/27/2023 11:51:16 AM Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS

Four CS professors were ranked as outstanding on this list including Jeff Erickson, Ryan Cunningham, Timothy Chan, and Aishwarya Ganesan the highest honor provided by CITL.

Written by Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS

This past month, the Center of Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign released their List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent By Their Students for the Fall 2022 semester.

Illinois Computer Science had 28 faculty members included on the list.

Our facultys commitment to excellence in teaching computer science shines through in many ways, including the number of professors honored by this list from CITL, said Department Head and Abel Bliss Professor in Engineering Nancy M. Amato. This is one of many fitting acknowledgments of our facultys noteworthy teaching efforts.

Of the 28 total faculty included, the following four ranked as outstanding which is the highest honor given through this list by CITL:

The other 24 faculty included on the list were:

We teach a demanding subject that constantly evolves, said Mahesh Viswanathan, Illinois CS professor and Associate Head for Academics. Our professors at Illinois Computer Science maintain an impressive command of the subject matter, and relay that to our excellent students in exciting ways.

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Illinois CS Places 28 Faculty on CITL List of Teachers Ranked as ... - Illinois Computer Science News

Each person has about 4 million sequence differences in their genome relative to the reference human genome. These differences are known as variants. A central goal in precision medicine is understanding which of these variants contribute to disease in a particular patient. Therefore, much of the human genome annotation effort is devoted to developing resources to help interpret the relative contribution of human variants to different observable phenotypes i.e., determining variant impact.

Recently, Yale School of Medicine led a large NIH-sponsored study where multiple institutions and international collaborators came together to address this challenge. This study generated a large, organized dataset from four individual donors using high-quality genome sequencing to identify all the variants and many different assays to determine their effect on molecular phenotypes in 25 different tissues. Known as EN-TEx, the resource is an important step toward the future of personalized care. The team published its findings in Cell on March 30.

Our work helps provide a better annotation of the genome and a better understanding of variant impact, says Mark Gerstein, PhD, Albert Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and member of the new Yale Section of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science. He also is affiliated at Yale with molecular biophysics & biochemistry, computer science, and statistics & data science. An average persons personal genome has variants in 4 million places. Were trying to figure out which of these lead to meaningful differences.

"This work represents the type of innovative large-scale data mining and teamwork that Yale is well-poised to create, coordinate, or participate in, says Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, MBA, PhD, Waldemar von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine and of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, and chair of the new section. As our new academic unit grows, we expect to see more and more of this type of exemplary biomedical data science work originate from here.

This work represents the type of innovative large-scale data mining and teamwork that Yale is well-poised to create, coordinate, or participate in.

In their latest project, the team utilized long-read sequencing technologies to determine diploid genomes from four donors with high accuracy. Everyone has a diploid genome. This means that we have two copies of 22 chromosomes as well as sex chromosomesone from our mother and one from our father. Now, for each position on the genome, we can look for the differences between mom and dad in many different functional assays in a perfectly balanced way, allowing us to accurately ascertain variant effect in many tissues, says Gerstein.

The team developed a variety of statistical and deep learning approaches to be able to leverage the dataset for practical applications. In particular, they built statistical models that identify subsets of regulatory regions in the human genome highly associated with disease variants. They also found many new linkages between variants and changes in nearby gene expression, connecting impactful but uncharacterized variants to genes with known function. This considerably expands previously determined catalogs, especially in many hard-to-assay tissues.

More fundamentally, the team developed a deep learning model that was able to predict whether a variant would disrupt a binding site for a regulatory factora protein that binds to specific sequences in the genome to turn nearby genes on or off. Interestingly, they found that to accurately predict this, they needed to look beyond just the binding site itself and consider a large genomic region around the site. The key to whether a binding site would be impacted was the presence of nearby binding sequences for other regulatory factors. Think of regulatory factors as the legs of the Lunar Module, says Gerstein. If it has four legs and one leg doesnt work, the three other legs can anchor the defective leg. Similarly, the anchoring of other regulatory factors might stabilize the disrupted binding site and make it less sensitive to variants.

One limitation of the resource is that only four people of European descent are profiled. The team would like to eventually enlarge their study to encompass hundreds of individuals with more diverse ancestries.

Overall, these advances will allow researchers and clinicians to better interpret potential disease-causing variants in an individual, connecting them to regulatory sites, nearby genes, and their tissue of action. Weve provided a consistent, beautiful data set and annotation resource for making these interpretations, says Gerstein.

The global team was assembled by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) within NIH, as part of NHGRI's ENCODE consortium, which aims to functionally annotate the genome. The team included collaborators from institutions including Baylor College of Medicine; the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; California Institute of Technology; the Centre for Genomic Regulation; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; the European Bioinformatics Institute; HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology; Johns Hopkins University; New York Institute of Technology; Stanford University; University of California, Irvine; University of California, San Diego; University of Hong Kong; University of Massachusetts Medical School; University of Toronto (Canada); and University of Washington, Seattle.

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Yale-led Team Creates Comprehensive Resource for Impact of ... - Yale School of Medicine