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Research in Focus: Needles, Haystacks, and Sugar Chains – Michigan Technological University

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

Tarun Dam

professor of chemistry; director of the biochemistry and molecular biology bachelor's program

When Dam got KC's email, he saw the opportunity to use the power of machine learning to make the process of glycobiology more efficient.

Working together with collaborators from Wichita State University, Kansas State University, the University of Houston, and Soka University in Tokyo, Japan, Dam and KC began studying the glycosylation of an amino acid known as asparagine. Glycans that attach to asparagine are called N-linked glycans, and they can only attach to asparagine if it has two specific amino acids on its right-hand side. The first can be any of the 20 common amino acids except proline, and the second must either be either serine or threonine.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dam and KC and their collaborators developed LMNglyPred, a deep-learning-based approach to predict N-linked glycosylated sites in human proteins using embeddings from a pre-trained language model.

"Now, without even doing any experiment, I can go to a computer scientist like Dukka, and if I give them a known protein, they can predict and say, 'Okay, you have five asparagines in that protein. Three will have sugar chains in this location. Two will not.' Without any experiment! That's the power of machine learning and of this collaboration."

Like all good teachers, KC explains his part of the project using a familiar metaphor.

"We cannot for sure say, 'This is where the needle is,'" KC says. "But we can really narrow that search space, so that instead of looking at everything, we can just search the area where it's most likely going to be."

professor of computer science; associate dean for research in the College of Computing

KC says the fields of computer science and glycobiology have been collaborating for nearly two decades, but using deep learning tools and large language models in this work is very newso new that KC thinks he, Dam, and their collaborators may be the first to have used a language model to predict glycosylation. The implications for glycobiologists like Damand for the medical field as a wholeare potentially immense.

Yet for all the giant leaps made by large language models and other artificial intelligence tools in recent years, KC is quick to acknowledge the foundation on which his work rests.

"It's a loop, right?" says KC. "Experimentalists like Tarun generate all this data, which we use to train our model. We then use the protein language model to inform more and better experiments. So their data helps our model get better, and our model helps their experiments get better. It's a loop."

Dam says he and KC have "huge ideas" for further collaboration on proteinsspecifically those with biomarkers for cancer.

"Tarun only cares about sugars," KC says with a chuckle, teasing Dam like an old friend. "Not to diminish anything about sugar, but there are 400 post-translational modifications, and glycosylation is only one of those 400. But when I talk to Tarun, he makes it sound like that ornament is the only important thing in the world."

Dam gives the good-natured ribbing right back to KC. "Yes, yes, he studies the other ornaments, too," Dam says with mock dismissal. "But no other modifications affect 70 percent of proteins. Only glycosylation affects the protein from birth to death. I try to convince Dukka to do more with glycobiology. It's so vast, and so important."

KC laughs, then concedes that he and Dam are considering exploring the "cross-talk between phosphorylation and O-GlcNAc." His explanation of the importance of these glycosylations to biology and human health elicits a nod of admiration from his friend and colleague.

"Dukka is not a glycobiologist, but he understands the significance of it almost like he is one," says Dam. "It's fun working with him. We respect each other's expertise. Both of our labs are doing work that is significant, and that significance will only grow as our collaboration continues."

KC agrees. "We have other interests of our own, of course, but we found some common intereststhese sugars that kind of bind us."

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigans flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.

"What we do, what we areit's all because of proteins."

"In bioinformatics, we often say we are not trying to find a needle in a haystack. We are trying to find the few spots in the haystack where needles are most likely going to be."

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Research in Focus: Needles, Haystacks, and Sugar Chains - Michigan Technological University

Computer science majors ‘buzzy’ with saving the bees – The Appalachian Online

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

Honey bees play a vital role in the environment and the human food chain, but the species is facing a rapid population decline. However, a team of computer science majors at App State have been working to change that.

According to Bee Informed Partnership, a non-profit dedicated to researching and improving the health of honey bees, beekeepers throughout the U.S. lost about 48.2% of honey bee colonies within the last year.

The team of computer science majors are trying to save the bees by collecting data from the hives through technology and codes they have been able to create for App States Multipurpose Apiary Informatics Systems project.

Bees are responsible for one third of our food. If they are not there we cannot produce enough food, said Rahman Tashakkori, the director of AppMAIS.

Tashakkori and the other principal researchers, both at App State and UNC-Charlotte, created AppMAIS with the intention of saving the honey bees after learning the bees were dying at a rate of around 50% per year. The students and staff on AppMAIS have created a computerized bee hive that monitors the health of the bee colony year-round.

We print and build all the equipment there, Tashakkori said. The students put it together and the idea is to learn from the audio, video, humidity, temperature, scale and genetics. We have been trying to save the bees.

The program has 28 hives that they monitor daily. Six hives are on App States campus, six sit on the State Farm parking lot and 13 other hives are dispersed between Blowing Rock, Todd and West Jefferson. The team also has three hives located at Howest University of Applied Sciences in Belgium.

AppMAIS has worked on monitoring all of these hives through a combination of codes they have written, equipment they 3D printed, cameras and microcontrollers called Raspberry Pi.

Its a computer that we put in, in front of the hive, Tashakkori said. They record the video from the entrance of the hive. Since then, weve had so much success by observing and listening.

AppMAIS and the students that have participated in the program have worked for three years to provide a solution to colony collapse disorder.

Colony collapse disorder is a huge issue for bees, said Sophie Columbia, a senior and graduate research assistant for AppMAIS. Bee colonies are just dying.

With the impact bees have on our everyday lives, the team has to collect and understand a lot more data to understand why this has been a persisting issue, Columbia said. The more they learn the easier it will be to identify health issues in the hive and stage interventions to save the hive.

Tashakkori and the AppMAIS team work to monitor the bees through as little hands-on interaction as possible. They only open the hives four times a year for Bee Monitoring, where they take genetic samples and check the hives manually. They limit the amount of times they open the hives because every time they open them, new problems may be introduced to the colonys health and the bees will become stressed, Tashakkori said.

However, the bees tend to have other plans for the AppMAIS team as the queen bees can sometimes put themselves in danger. This can happen when a new queen hatches, leading the hive to split up for the protection of each queen. The portion of the hive that leaves may face many obstacles on their way, such as predators or severe weather. Another dangerous situation is when the queen happens to go outside the safety of the hive.

Theres been a couple of times that Dr. Tashakkori will call us up and say A queen has gotten loose, somebody come down, and we have to go down and rescue the queen and put it back in the hive, said Aedan Simons-Rudolph, senior and AppMAIS student researcher. Its fun, but Im definitely better at writing software than I am at beekeeping.

The coding, software creation and hardware construction are the heart of the program. After all, it is a computer science program.

A lot of people view computer science as this monolithic institution, Simons-Rudolph said. Its really intimidating. Its really difficult to get into. Only geniuses can code, and what I found is that its really not the case.

The research students have found joy in the idea that their technical capabilities are able to be used in a tangible way that branches out beyond the lines of code.

Its really nice to know that what Im doing on the backend, even though Im just writing Python, it does actually have an effect on the well-being of the hives, Columbia said.

AppMAIS gained funding from the North Carolina General Assemblys Research Opportunities Initiative grant three years ago, allowing them to grow their research from The Bee Project into what it is.

What Im really proud of is that, whatever solution humanity will find to this really existential threat of the death of our pollinators, that this project is gonna be a huge part of it, Simons-Rudolph said.

Computer science majors 'buzzy' with saving the bees - The Appalachian Online

Missouri S&T students named Knights of St. Patrick – Missouri S&T News and Research

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

Posted by Laura Studyvin On March 8, 2024

St. Pat and court arrive on campus in 2023. Photo by Noah Richardson/Missouri S&T.

Student Knights of St. Patrick have been selected to represent Missouri University of Science and Technologys student organizations during the 116th St. Pats celebration in Rolla, Missouri.

The students were knighted during a ceremony on Friday, March 8, outside the Havener Center on the Missouri S&T campus.

The practice of knighting students every spring can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Missouri S&T engineering students declared St. Patrick the patron saint of engineers.

The 2024 student Knights of St. Patrick are as follows:

About Missouri University of Science and Technology

Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) is a STEM-focused research university of over 7,000 students located in Rolla, Missouri. Part of the four-campus University of Missouri System, Missouri S&T offers over 100 degrees in 40 areas of study and is among the nations top public universities for salary impact, according to the Wall Street Journal. For more information about Missouri S&T, visit http://www.mst.edu.

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Missouri S&T students named Knights of St. Patrick - Missouri S&T News and Research

New Breakthrough Brings Matrix Multiplication Closer to Ideal – Quanta Magazine

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

Thats where Strassens laser method finally comes into play. The laser method typically works very well and generally finds a good way to kill a subset of blocks to remove the overlap, Le Gall said. After the laser has eliminated, or burned away, all the overlaps, you can construct the final product matrix, C.

Putting these various techniques together results in an algorithm for multiplying two matrices with a deliberately stingy number of multiplications overall at least in theory. The laser method is not intended to be practical; its just a way to think about the ideal way to multiply matrices. We never run the method [on a computer], Zhou said. We analyze it.

And that analysis is what led to the biggest improvement to omega in more than a decade.

Last summers paper, by Duan, Zhou and Wu, showed that Strassens process could still be sped up significantly. It was all because of a concept they called a hidden loss, buried deep within previous analyses a result of unintentionally killing too many blocks, Zhou said.

The laser method works by labeling blocks with overlaps as garbage, slated for disposal; other blocks are deemed worthy and will be saved. The selection process, however, is somewhat randomized. A block rated as garbage may, in fact, turn out to be useful after all. This wasnt a total surprise, but by examining many of these random choices, Duans team determined that the laser method was systematically undervaluing blocks: More blocks should be saved and fewer thrown out. And, as is usually the case, less waste translates into greater efficiency.

Being able to keep more blocks without overlap thus leads to a faster matrix multiplication algorithm, Le Gall said.

After proving the existence of this loss, Duans team modified the way that the laser method labeled blocks, reducing the waste substantially. As a result, they set a new upper bound for omega at around 2.371866 an improvement over the previous upper bound of 2.3728596, set in 2020 by Josh Alman and Vassilevska Williams. That may seem like a modest change, lowering the bound by just about 0.001. But its the single biggest improvement scientists have seen since 2010. Vassilevska Williams and Almans 2020 result, by comparison, only improved upon its predecessor by 0.00001.

But whats most exciting for researchers isnt just the new record itself which didnt last long. Its also the fact that the paper revealed a new avenue for improvement that, until then, had gone totally unnoticed. For nearly four decades, everyone has been relying upon the same laser method, Le Gall said. Then they found that, well, we can do better.

The January 2024 paper refined this new approach, enabling Vassilevska Williams, Zhou and their co-authors to further reduce the hidden loss. This led to an additional improvement of omegas upper bound, reducing it to 2.371552. The authors also generalized that same technique to improve the multiplication process for rectangular (n-by-m) matrices a procedure that has applications in graph theory, machine learning and other areas.

Some further progress along these lines is all but certain, but there are limits. In 2015, Le Gall and two collaborators proved that the current approach the laser method coupled with the Coppersmith-Winograd recipe cannot yield an omega below 2.3078. To make any further improvements, Le Gall said, you need to improve upon the original [approach] of Coppersmith and Winograd that has not really changed since 1987. But so far, nobody has come up with a better way. There may not even be one.

Improving omega is actually part of understanding this problem, Zhou said. If we can understand the problem well, then we can design better algorithms for it. [And] people are still in the very early stages of understanding this age-old problem.

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New Breakthrough Brings Matrix Multiplication Closer to Ideal - Quanta Magazine

‘Girls Who Code’ on closing the gender gap in technology – Spectrum News 1

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

DUBLIN, Ohio "Girls Who Code" is a school club that has been offered in the U.S. and around the world since 2012, but with Intel moving in, it could start paving the way for the companys future female workforce in Ohio.

Thirteen year olf Ruby Elliott is scrambling for her laptop to start coding.

Coding is one of her strong suits.

Ive always been like a pretty creative person, she said. I love art, and Im also super into math. It is fun being able to tell a computer to do something and something cool happens.

Shes part of the Girls who Code at Davis Middle School in Dublin. The club is designed to close the gender gap in technology and computer science.

Elliott said coding runs in her family.

I basically grew up with my dad, always coding on his computer for work, she said. And I guess it was kind of like ingrained in my brain.

Cary Lindberg is the clubs adviser at the school.

With Intel moving in, Lindberg explained exposing girls to the tech industry is more important than ever.

Theres a lot of jobs opening up as Intel is coming in, she said, and so, especially with it being so close to us, there are going to be more opportunities for them to join that workforce and fill those jobs. And if they didnt see themselves in it, it wouldnt even be on their radar of something that they could do.

Girls Who Code is also about breaking gender norms, which is especially important to Elliott.

Throughout the entire history of the world, women in general, have been like very much pushed aside, Elliott said, but having a club where its all girls, doing things that usually you see men doing, I feel like its an important thing because we can do what they can do too and better sometimes.

While Girls Who Code has been around since 2012, Davis Middle School offered the club since 2016.

The club said its on track to help close the gender gap in entry-level tech jobs by the year 2030.

Updated CS advising options stir mixed reactions The Scarlet & Black – Scarlet and Black

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

This week, 70 2nd-year intended computer science majors received assignments to their new advisors. This year, nine options were available to students a list that included pre-tenure, retired and non-computer science faculty, and even a non-faculty department member.

Ellie Seehorn `25, a computer science Student Educational Policy Committee member, explained that while students declaring most other majors directly ask professors to be their advisors, computer science majors-to-be fill out an adviser preference form to rank all available options. An algorithm is then run to match advisers with advisees based on their rankings.

Very CS, she said.

According to Seehorn, the assignment process ensured students were spread evenly among faculty, particularly important in a large department where not all faculty are equally popular.

My adviser primarily teaches 300-level courses, Seehorn said. A lot of people wouldnt even know her but shes an awesome adviser.

Aside from tenured faculty, this years list included Leah Perlmutter, first-year assistant professor, Liz Rodrigues, associate professor of Humanities, and Professor Emeritus Henry Walker, digital scholarship librarian who currently lives and teaches in California and advises online. Sarah Dahlby Albright, a peer education coordinator, is another non-faculty option for double majors who already have another faculty advisor.

Jayson Krunkel `26 was assigned Rodrigues, who he had ranked first on the adviser preference form.

She does a lot with figuring out how to overlap very different interests, so I thought that would be a really good choice for me, said Krunkel, who intends to declare majors in computer science and anthropology, as well as a digital studies concentration. She could be my CS adviser and my digital studies adviser.

Jinny Eo `26, who is considering declaring a second major in philosophy, also ranked Rodrigues as first choice for her interdisciplinary background. She added that a good personal impression had been a primary factor in her rankings Some advising styles I didnt really want to have so I just eliminated those.

Rodrigues said she had been brought onto the advising team after she began teaching CSC-105: The Digital Age, a computer science course for non-intended majors. To her, the department has been very deliberate in teaching for inclusion to the greatest extent possible.

They thought about putting me on the list for a very long time because they had talked to me about it, she said. But it was still a couple more years before I actually started.

Charlie Curtsinger, associate professor and department chair, said the advisers, with their range of backgrounds, bring something different to the process. As a tenured professor, he said he takes on 20-25 advisees yearly, and personally enjoys group advising not just to manage those numbers, but because students often have good ideas for each other.

On the other hand, Curtsinger continued, students could pick Dahlby Albright for the math and education in her background, while Walker, who helped found the major at Grinnell, has a perspective on the department nobody else has.

However, Curtsinger added, Its also what allows us to not have 35 advisees each.

To further reduce the workload on advisers, intended majors are only allowed to declare in the spring of their second year a restriction not applied in other departments.

Seehorn said this long wait was the only thing Ive heard people dont like about this system.

As for Krunkel, the two-week window between receiving ones adviser assignment and the deadline for the major declaration form was too short. I wish they started this process a little earlier, so that we have more time to talk to our advisers and figure things out.

Rodrigues said she thinks the department has grappled carefully with balancing the numbers of advisors and students.

Theyve been looking to bring people into the advising process to make sure students stay connected with the resources, she said.

While Curtsinger acknowledged it was not ideal for advisors to have to split their attention across so many advisees, he said it was better than not letting a student pursue the area that they care about. He emphasized that the goal of the computer science department is to continue ensuring all potential majors can take the classes they need.

Were not that far away from the time when departments ask to be able to hire more faculty, he said. We will be asking to hire more.

Although the department has had to change their advising process to cope with rising demands, Curtsinger said they were still trying to maintain a system that preserves as much of the original experience as possible.

We tweak it a bit every year, he said. But the goal is to just do something that we can make work as well as possible while still keeping the spirit of how advising works.

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Updated CS advising options stir mixed reactions The Scarlet & Black - Scarlet and Black

COLUMN: Thoughts on cybersecurity | Computer Science | romesentinel.com – Rome Sentinel

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

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COLUMN: Thoughts on cybersecurity | Computer Science | romesentinel.com - Rome Sentinel

John Brown University to Offer AI Degree; Other Universities Plan New Classes – Arkansas Business Online

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

Justus Selwyn, chairman of the computer science department at John Brown University, helped start a program to let students major in artificial intelligence. (Michael Woods)

John Brown University of Siloam Springs wants to stay ahead of the artificial intelligence curve, a mission it started several years ago, so in February it became the first university in Arkansas to announce plans to offer a bachelors degree in AI.

Officials at John Brown, which has an enrollment of slightly more than 2,200 students, also said it is the first Christian university to offer a bachelors degree in artificial intelligence, a program that will begin in the fall semester of 2024. About a dozen universities nationwide offer AI degrees. JBU began offering a minor in AI in the fall of 2023.

Other universities in Arkansas, including the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, offer or are planning to offer AI classes.

Mariofanna Milanova, a computer science professor and AI expert at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said she hopes her school will begin offering AI degrees soon.

This is the future, Milanova said. They cannot escape from this future.

Bloomberg Intelligence reported last year that generative AI was a $40 billion industry that would grow to more than $1.3 trillion by 2032. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, includes programs that use prompts and patterns to produce texts and images.

The applications of artificial intelligence range from cloud computing to natural language processing to the Internet of Things.

For Justus Selwyn, the plan to offer the degree at JBU started around the time he joined John Brown as the chairman of the computer science department in the summer of 2021. The university and members of its advisory board were discussing prominent technologies that John Brown needed to address with its students.

We didnt have courses like that in 2021, 2022, Selwyn said. After I joined JBU, I was trying to bring those advanced courses to JBU for computer science students. Those are some of the topics that are so important evolving around AI.

We thought we can bring these courses and start a separate major so we can send our students to companies who three or four years from now will want AI students, students [who] have had hands-on AI. That is where the thought process came in 2022 and we started to work on it.

The hope is that John Browns degree announcement and the growing market for an AI-fluent workforce will create momentum in the academic community in Arkansas.

Justin Richie, vice president of data and AI for Nerdery of Minneapolis, a data products studio, worked with several for-profit universities about how to develop an AI curriculum. Richie said that as AI has grown, it has become important for prospective employees to know how to use the technology.

The interesting aspect of AI right now, especially from an education [standpoint], is where does it fit in? Does it fit in its own segment of majors or does it fall under a computer science program? Richie said.

I see it being on both the technology major side, but also from a business major perspective, training our students to be fluent in AI is going to be a key employment advantage when they hit the marketplace.

Milanova said AI education is important because it is not just about creating new artificial intelligence programs; it is also creating new ways to use old technologies.

There is so much possibility for creativities, Milanova said. There are so many opportunities for people to create amazing algorithms It is not necessary to be completely innovative. Little changes, they can make significant differences. This is the beauty.

Selwyn said incarnations of AI have been around for decades. If you are on a website and a movie recommendation for you pops up, that is an example of artificial intelligence at work.

These are all AI components; these are already in place but a layman, a user didnt know this was an AI thing, Selwyn said. Industry is already going in that direction, so JBU and in northwest Arkansas, we are wanting our students to know what is AI.

Selwyn said business leaders responded positively to John Browns degree announcement.

I dream [that] after four years they will want our AI grads from JBU, Selwyn said. Name an industry and they are going to hire AI and mission learning and data analytics.

Richie said many in the academic world are just trying to figure out how to incorporate an AI curriculum.

I definitely see a lot of momentum behind that curriculum, Richie said.

Im bullish, but I do believe it is going to be our fourth industrial revolution. It is changing the narrative in the last 10 years [for] people like me who went to school for math and computer science.

Now people dont really need to know that stuff. It is a lot more of what you do with it rather than knowing how the entire engine works.

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John Brown University to Offer AI Degree; Other Universities Plan New Classes - Arkansas Business Online

Could AI coding threaten software jobs? – The Boston Globe

March 12, 2024 | Author: admin

But now the gravy train may be about to end in a way that not only shocks budding software engineers but also threatens the hefty salaries of mid-career professionals.

In February, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang turned heads when he told the World Government Summit that over the course of the last 10, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that children learn computer science. Now, he said, its almost exactly the opposite. Because artificial intelligence systems can now help create software and theyll only get better.

Nvidia has benefited tremendously from demand for the hardware that fuels AI, sending its stock surging from about $130 a share in 2021 to nearly $900 today. And Huang has become Wall Streets go-to AI guru.

But is he right? With all the talk about AIs promise and peril, is there enormous upheaval coming to software jobs and the people and places that rely on them?

Yes, says Matt Welsh, a former professor of computer science at Harvard. A massive shift is on the horizon though he doesnt believe it will happen overnight.

Ive seen trends come and go, notes Welsh, who worked at Apple and Google before cofounding Fixie.ai. Ive seen technologies emerge over time. Ive never seen anything like AI, in terms of the pace of innovation and the dramatic effect its having on the whole industry. Not the introduction of personal computers. Not the iPhone. Not the internet. None of these things have had quite a dramatic effect in this [short] period of time.

He says that programming has long been a kind of priesthood, an exclusive club for the lucky few. But thats not going to last.

Soon, much as Huang has predicted, programming will become something that anyone can do. Because the language that youll need to program wont be Java or C++. Itll be English.

Late last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk argued that AI could be the most disruptive force in history and that there will come a point where no job is needed.

Welsh believes that the disruption to the tech industry will come in two waves. First, an initial phase in which software engineers using ChatGPT or Microsofts Copilot become considerably more productive. And, for many, that phase is already underway.

Increased productivity may allow tech companies to reduce the number of engineers on the payroll while maintaining the same level of output. If you just look across the software industry, the vast majority of it is people doing things that are extremely mundane and easy to automate at some point in the not-too-distant future, he says.

But the second wave will likely bring much more disruption, Welsh argues. That will happen when we stop needing programmers to write these programs in the first place ... and that, I think, is not something that anyone in the industry is prepared for. This change, he believes, will start to unfold over the next several years.

In November, the job site ResumeBuilder polled 750 leaders at businesses that currently or plan to use AI in 2024 and discovered that more than a third say the technology replaced workers this year, and close to half believe that AI will lead to layoffs in 2024. Forty-two percent of workers, meanwhile, worry about how AI might affect their job, according to a survey by CNBC and SurveyMonkey.

When I challenged Welsh on the notion that an entire industry and millions of careers could be turned upside down, he countered with history. Disruption has come for industry after industry, he said. Highly skilled people once wove cloth. Now, for the most part, sophisticated machines weave cloth. And across the manufacturing sector, millions of jobs have been lost or drastically altered over the past century.

But what about the low quality of AI-generated code? A recent research paper argued that code written with an AI assistant tended to resemble the not-so-hot work of an itinerant contributor.

Welsh likens this to a story of burritos and lasagna. The invention of the microwave in American homes enabled people to plop a frozen burrito into the microwave and have a meal in two minutes, he notes. Was this meal as nutritious and good as the homemade lasagna that mom would have made in the oven for four hours? No. But was it sustenance and calories? Yes.

Still, its a huge topic of debate, and not everyone is convinced that the rise of AI will lead to a massive restructuring of the industry.

Jonathan Bell, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern, says hes certainly seen an AI-powered surge in engineers productivity. But he believes that if the stakes are high on the software youre building, youre going to want a human defining and refining the problem and, crucially, running quality control.

Bell, who studies how automation affects coders, is currently working on software to help facilitate Northeasterns doctoral admissions process: Could I ask some large language model thing to write that entire piece of software for me? Possibly. Would I want to trust that it was correct? Definitely not.

He argues that increased productivity may simply allow companies to get more ambitious and work on more projects. What weve generally seen in the past, he says, is that companies say, Wait! With the same amount of money, I could have software that does more stuff? And its more complicated, and delivers more value to our users? Lets do that ... Thats the optimistic view, and the cynical view is that you can lay off 30 percent of your staff.

Welsh maintains that we should gird ourselves for a major shift in the tech industry one that big companies know is coming: I just think that were actually now on the cusp of this, versus something that seemed completely fantastical even five or ten years ago. I think it may become reality much sooner than we anticipate.

Follow Kara Miller @karaemiller.

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Could AI coding threaten software jobs? - The Boston Globe