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Generally, I don't really have much time or really much of an excuse to just sit down and do work on a project I'm really interested in, Kate Ma, 2023 Pearl Hacks participant, said. It was really nice to have a space where we could just sit down for a day and really harness our creativity and see what we could come up with.

Participants can either enter Pearl Hacks with a team or form one at the event and are encouraged to attend workshops being held during the event. In addition, they cantalk with mentors to integrate what they learn from the workshops into their projects.

Jagani said submissions for each category are judged by representatives of its specific sponsor. For example, this year Google is one of the sponsors, and employees from the company will judge the projects submitted under that prompt.

Other prompts created by the Pearl Hacks team will be judged by faculty in the Department of Computer Science.

Depending on the success of each teams project, different prizes can be earned including AirPods, backpacks and other merchandise.

Patel saidduring her first UNC hackathon experience, the supportive environment really stuck out to her.

I had never been to a hackathon that valued team bonding and meeting other students that are similar to you, and that's really what Pearl Hacks is all about, Patel said.

A current senior, Jagani remembers coming into UNC intending to be a computer science major. But, she saidafter Pearl Hacks she found the information science major which ended up fitting her interests better.

Jagani said she hopes Pearl Hacks can help participants find something theyre passionate about, whether that be computer science or something else.

It's a beginner-friendly hackathon meant for women and gender non-conforming students, so it's just a super supportive environment overall, Patel said. But since it is beginner friendly, we aren't specifically looking for computer science students you can be literally any major.

@dailytarheel|university@dailytarheel.com

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Pearl Hacks to host 10th annual hackathon - - The Daily Tar Heel

Information stolen from the Central Intelligence Agency began showing up in 2017 on a website called WikiLeaks.

Over eight months the site published more than two dozen groups of classified documents that it called Vault 7, outlining the secret methods that the United States used to break into computer networks used by foreign governments and terrorists. The disclosures caused what the government termed catastrophic damage to national security and set off an intensive hunt for the person responsible.

On Thursday, that person, Joshua Schulte, 35, was sentenced in Federal District Court in Manhattan to 40 years in prison. Mr. Schulte, a computer engineer, had worked for the spy agency for six years, holding the highest security clearances and designing hacking tools.

He was convicted in 2022 of charges including illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information. That followed convictions in 2020 for contempt of court and making false statements. He was also convicted of receiving and transporting child pornography.

Judge Jesse M. Furman said Mr. Schultes actions amounted to a digital Pearl Harbor that caused untold damage to national security.

Im blown away, to put it mildly, by Mr. Schultes lack of remorse, the judge added.

Addressing the court for 30 minutes just before Judge Furman handed down his sentence, Mr. Schulte did not apologize but asked that he be sentenced to time served.

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CIA Computer Scientist Joshua Schulte Is Sentenced to 40 Years - The New York Times

CORVALLIS, Ore. Research involving Oregon State University has shown that a swarm of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots can be supervised by one person without subjecting the individual to an undue workload.

The findings represent a big step toward efficiently and economically using swarms in a range of roles from wildland firefighting to package delivery to disaster response in urban environments.

We dont see a lot of delivery drones yet in the United States, but there are companies that have been deploying them in other countries, said Julie A. Adams of the OSU College of Engineering. It makes business sense to deploy delivery drones at a scale, but it will require a single person be responsible for very large numbers of these drones. Im not saying our work is a final solution that shows everything is OK, but it is the first step toward getting additional data that would facilitate that kind of a system.

The results, published today in Field Robotics, stem from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency program known as OFFSET, short for Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics. Adams was part of a group that received an OFFSET grant in 2017.

During the course of the four-year project, researchers deployed swarms of up to 250 autonomous vehicles multi-rotor aerial drones, and ground rovers able to gather information in concrete canyon urban surroundings where line-of-sight, satellite-based communication is impaired by buildings. The information the swarms collect during their missions at military urban training sites have the potential to help keep U.S. troops and civilians more safe.

Adams was a co-principal investigator on one of two swarm system integrator teams that developed the system infrastructure and integrated the work of other teams focused on swarm tactics, swarm autonomy, human-swarm teaming, physical experimentation and virtual environments.

The project required taking off-the-shelf technologies and building the autonomy needed for them to be deployed by a single human called the swarm commander, said Adams, the associate director for deployed systems and policy at OSUs Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute. That work also required developing not just the needed systems and the software, but also the user interface for that swarm commander to allow a single human to deploy these ground and aerial systems.

Collaborators with Smart Information Flow Technologies developed a virtual reality interface called I3 that lets the commander control the swarm with high-level directions.

The commanders werent physically driving each individual vehicle, because if you're deploying that many vehicles, they can't a single human cant do that, Adams said. The idea is that the swarm commander can select a play to be executed and can make minor adjustments to it, like a quarterback would in the NFL. The objective data from the trained swarm commanders demonstrated that a single human can deploy these systems in built environments, which has very broad implications beyond this project.

Testing took place at multiple Department of Defense Combined Armed Collective Training Facilities. Each multiday field exercise introduced additional vehicles, and every 10 minutes swarm commanders provided information about their workload and how stressed or fatigued they were.

During the final field exercise, featuring more than 100 vehicles, the commanders workload levels were also assessed through physiological sensors that fed information into an algorithm that estimates someones sensory channel workload levels and their overall workload.

The swarm commanders workload estimate did cross the overload threshold frequently, but just for a few minutes at a time, and the commander was able to successfully complete the missions, often under challenging temperature and wind conditions, Adams said.

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One person can supervise 'swarm' of 100 unmanned autonomous vehicles, OSU research shows - Oregon State University

Large Language Models and other AI systems will only reach their full potential when a broader set of people build them

Kathy Pham is a Computer Scientist, Senior Advisor at Mozilla; Vice President of AI and Machine Learning at Workday; Adjunct Lecturer at Harvard. Opinions here are her own and not on behalf of any affiliated organization.

In 2023, we learned a lot about AI models: Whats possible, like discovering a new class of antibiotics. What's uncertain, like how exactly businesses will integrate chatbots into their operations. And how the technology might be regulated and implemented across governments, per the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, the NIST Risk Management Framework, the EU AI Act, and the United States executive order on AI.

But for those within the industry or those paying close attention there was another big learning. That the people building the foundation of the most influential technology of our era are overwhelmingly from a very narrow set of disciplines: computer science, software engineering, and even more specifically, machine learning.

It makes sense for the people writing the code to be computer scientists and programmers thats our trade. But building these models is about a lot more than code. Its about identifying use cases, making design decisions, and anticipating and mitigating potential harms. In short: Its about making sure the technology isnt just functional, but also trustworthy. And this requires skill sets beyond machine learning and traditional computer science.

I know this well from my own experiences across academia, non-profits, government, and industry. The hallmark of truly impressive technology is productive applications and companies only build the best and right things when they pull together experts across disciplines.

Five years ago, I published an essay about the consequences of this bias in the industry and how we might fix it. I argued that if we want to change the tech industry to make software more fair and less harmful then we need to change what classes are required for a computer science degree.

AI has grown exponentially since then. Its tremendous computing capacity means even more unpredictable, unintended harms. My original thesis remains true: We need to expand computer science curricula to include the humanities. But those changes take time. Right now, we also need to break down the persistent engineering / non-engineering divide directly at the industry level.

Theres no shortage of stories about AI systems harms: hallucinations that generate incorrect information, disinformation, sexist and racist outputs, toxic training sets. In many cases, these are problems that engineers overlooked, but that others like cognitive scientists and media theorists confronted after the fact. The order of operations is clearly backward: These harms should be addressed before the system is deployed. Proactive, not reactive, should be the status quo, and thats only possible with more varied expertise. Its true that some companies have made progress on this front with their trust and safety teams. But those teams are still siloed and splintered.

There are some bright spots these companies can emulate: In recent years, Airbnb has centered the work of Laura Murphy, a legal and civil rights expert, to fight discrimination in product features. In 2018, Salesforce established an Office of Ethical and Humane Use a place for internal frontline employees, executives, and external experts across a broad range of functions to guide decision-making. (I was an inaugural advisory board member.) When AI really entered the zeitgeist, the office was ready for action.

It isnt a big ask for the engineers to talk with the lawyers or social scientists. A simple conversation Hey, if I create Booleans with two choices for gender in my model, is that OK? can head off bias and the need for an audit later on. Im often reminded of my late father, a truck driver. There are countless engineers working to streamline the trucking industry. But how many of them spend time speaking with actual truckers?

In addition to overt harms like bias, there are also harms of omission. A dearth of humanities experts means a missed opportunity for AI systems with clear use cases and problem-solving capabilities. Right now, many AI systems are developed and deployed first, with a goal of finding a purpose later. Consider OpenAIs 128K context window or Anthropics 200K context window: technically impressive, and lacking clear objectives until they are used for meaningful applications for society. Research and development without a clear goal isnt necessarily a bad thing, but these systems use tremendous amounts of money and energy to train. And we also know real goals exist, like better cancer detection algorithms for people with darker skin. There are powerful examples of whats possible with this approach, like the Kiazi Bora app in Tanzania. Its creators identified a problem first a lack of agricultural literacy among women in East Africa and then built an AI chatbot to help solve it.

For AI systems to be more trustworthy, tech companies must prioritize a broad range of expertise. Yes, there has been encouraging progress on this front: Initiatives like All Tech is Human are connecting engineering to the social sciences and humanities, programs like Mozillas Responsible Computing Challenge are reimagining computer science curricula as encompassing humanistic studies, and teams like Workdays Responsible AI are convening boards that spans disciplines.

Whats next? Now we need industry change to match the accelerating speed of AI development and deployment.

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At tech companies, let's share the reins | Context - Context

By Felicity Phelan 1/30/24 10:22pm

Moshe Vardi started his computer science career over 7,000 miles away, never planning to end up in the U.S.

I finished my doctorate in Israel, and then I came to the United States just to do a post-doctorate at Stanford University, Vardi said. My plan was to go back to Israel, but cherchez la femme [look for the woman] I met my wife in Palo Alto, and the rest is history.

Vardis 30-year career at Rice includes appointments as a University Professor and Distinguished Service Professor, seven honorary doctorates and a slew of science and technology awards including three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards.

Even after 40 years in the U.S., Vardi said his personality still reflects the culture of his home country.

Israelis tend to be much more outspoken and blunt than Americans, Vardi said. I dont know if this is my strength or weakness, but Im very direct, and not everybodys comfortable with my directness.

One outlet for Vardis directness is writing. During the Fall 2020 semester, he authored several Thresher opinion pieces critical of Rice's decision to return to campus despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Another opinion, published in September 2022, discussed the purpose universities should serve in society.

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If you look at Rices mission statement, its about education and research and betterment of the world, Vardi said. We talk a lot about education [and] we want to be a research university. We talk very little about betterment of the world. Its there in the mission statement, but where are we talking about it? In classes, in where? Its just not there.

Vardi said he feels Rice students should focus on more than just academic and financial success.

[To] the students, yes, go have a great career. But you have a responsibility for the common good, Vardi said. Nobodys asking you to necessarily become Mother Teresa and go and spend your life in Calcutta feeding the poor, okay? But if everybody just thinks of themselves, we have a society that looks like the society we have.

In his support for the common good, Vardi is passionate about the interaction between technology and society. Hes been leading Rices Technology, Culture and Society Initiative since its founding in 2018 and was heavily involved in the recent change to make Rices computer science curriculum more ethics-focused. In 2018, Vardi began teaching COMP 301: Ethics and Accountability in Computer Science. In Spring 2023, the computer science department voted to make it a required undergraduate course.

The students really like the class because it talks about what computing is doing to society and social responsibility, Vardi said. There is no final exam in the class; its not a theoretical class. We ask them to write an essay about their own personal social responsibilities. And these essays to me are very, very moving.

Rodrigo Ferreira, one of Vardis colleagues in the computer science department and the current professor of COMP 301, says he admires Vardis commitment to pushing his values forward.

I think [Vardi] stands out in that he uses his position as a kind of springboard to talk about the social and ethical issues that matter to him, Ferreira said. He always finds time to push forward this initiative and this set of values that he believes are important and that I, too, believe are essential for the future of computer science and the world.

Vardi has also been outspoken about his experiences as a Jewish person on campus. On Dec. 6, 2023, he published an essay on Medium titled "A Moral Rot at Rice University," which he wrote in response to what he calls a pattern of antisemitism on Rice's campus, pointing to the passing of Student Association Senate Resolution 14.

Vardi said his original Medium essay received 30,000 views within two weeks of publication, far exceeding his expectations. The essay was also republished in the Houston Chronicle and The Times of Israel.

Though Vardi said the response to his essay was overwhelmingly positive, he did receive backlash. About a week after the essays publication, Vardi said an unknown person outside of the Rice community mailed him a note that read, Americans are sick of Jews whining [about] how discriminated against they are. Most Jews are obnoxious [and] greedy. Look at yourself. Jews bring on most of their own problems.

Vardi says this hatred, though uncomfortable, informs his identity.

I may look white. I dont consider myself white. I open my mouth; immediately people see Im not from here, Vardi said. [They ask] Where are you from? I say Im from Israel, so it takes about 30 seconds for people to realize that Im Jewish, and then I stand aside. The people who hate Black people also hate me.

Negative or positive, Vardi says the potential response didnt factor into his decision to write and publish the Medium article.

I wasnt thinking about what kind of response Im going to get, Vardi said. I just have to say, this is not acceptable. I have to stand up and shout.

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Moshe Vardi stands up and shouts - The Rice Thresher