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This unique partnership promises to offer groundbreaking innovation that will lead to new therapies and treatments to improve health and quality of life, said UT System Chancellor James B. Milliken. Were justifiably proud of the pioneering work being done at UTSA and UT Health San Antonio to educate and equip future medical practitioners on how to best harness the opportunities and address the challenges that AI will present for the field of health care in the years to come.

AIs presence can already be found in a variety of areas of the medical field including customized patient treatment plans, robotic surgeries and drug dosage. Additionally, UT Health San Antonio and UTSA have several research programs underway to improve health care diagnostics and treatment with the help of AI.

The World Economic Forum predicts that AI could enhance the patient experience by reducing wait times and improving efficiency in hospital health systems and by aggregating information from multiple sources to predict patient care. AI is also improving administrative online scheduling and appointment check-ins, reminder calls for follow-ups and digitized medical records.

Our goal is to prepare our students for the next generation of health care advances by providing comprehensive training in applied artificial intelligence, said Ronald Rodriguez, M.D., Ph.D., director of the M.D./M.S. in AI program and professor of medical education at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Through a combined curriculum of medicine and AI, our graduates will be armed with innovative training as they become future leaders in research, education, academia, industry and health care administration. They will be shaping the future of health care for all.

The UTSA M.S. in Artificial Intelligence is a multidisciplinary degree program with three tracks: data analytics, computer science, and intelligent and autonomous systems. The latter is a concentration that trains students with theory and applications. In the AI program, students will have an opportunity to work with emerging technology in the areas of computer science, mathematics, statistics, and electrical and computer engineering. Additionally, they will have the opportunity to conduct research alongside nationally recognized professors in MATRIX: The UTSA AI Consortium for Human Well-being, a research-intensive environment focused on developing forward-looking, sustainable and comprehensive AI solutions that benefit society.

This first-of-its-kind M.D./M.S. program has been several years in the making. Conversations about the innovative program began in 2019 with Ambika Mathur, dean of The UTSA Graduate School, and Robert R. Hromas, M.D., dean of UT Health San Antonios Long School of Medicine. Together, they worked through the pandemic with their teams to establish a degree pathway and curriculum that would prepare future physicians to lead in the workforce.

UTSA charged Dhireesha Kudithipudi with leading the development of the M.S. in AI curriculum in collaboration with three colleges. Over the course of one year, she closely collaborated with the faculty and chairs from three departments at UTSA and with UT Health San Antonios faculty. This effort resulted in the creation of new courses in AI, which will provide students with a rigorous cross-disciplinary training experience and reduce entry barriers for non-traditional students.

AI is transforming our world, and UTSAs approach to AI is grounded in transdisciplinary collaboration, underscoring our commitment to generating high-impact solutions to advance human well-being by engaging multiple and diverse audiences, saidMathur. Through this innovative partnership with UT Health San Antonio, aspiring medical leaders will gain mastery in the emerging technologies that will shape the health care profession for generations to come.

In 2021, a pilot program was introduced to UT Health San Antonio medical students. Two students who applied for and were accepted into the M.D./M.S. program for fall 2023 are projected to graduate in the spring of 2024. For these students, the combined degrees mean multiple possibilities in health care.

I believe the future of health care will require a physician to navigate the technical and clinical sides of medicine, Aaron Fanous, a fourth-year medical student. "While in the program, the experience opened my mind to the many possibilities of bridging the two fields. I look forward to using my dual degree, so that I can contribute to finding solutions to tomorrows medical challenges.

Eri Osta, is also a fourth-year medical student in the program. Osta said, The courses were designed with enough flexibility for us to pick projects from any industry, and medical students were particularly encouraged to undertake projects with direct health care applications. My dual degree will help align a patients medical needs with technologys potential. I am eager to play a role in shaping a more connected and efficient future for health care.

Medical students who are accepted to the dual degree program will be required to take a leave of absence from their medical education to complete two semesters of AI coursework at UTSA. Students will complete a total of 30 credit hours: nine credit hours in core courses including an internship, 15 credit hours in their degree concentration (Data Analytics, Computer Science, or Intelligent & Autonomous Systems) and six credit hours devoted to a capstone project.

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Nation's first dual degree in medicine and AI aims to prepare the ... - UTSA

FIRST ON FOX: A group of 30 House Republicans is demanding to know what the Department of Justice (DOJ) is doing to combat the emergence of AI-generated child pornography on the internet.

"We write to you with grave concern regarding increasing reports of artificial intelligence (AI) being used to generate child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) which are shared across the internet," Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

"While recognizing the benefits of appropriate uses of AI, including medical research, cybersecurity defense, streamlining public transit, and may other applications, we believe action must be taken to prevent individuals from using AI to generate CSAM."

TECH GIANT TO SHIELD CUSTOMERS FROM IP LAWSUITS RELATED TO AI TOOLS

Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., leads a letter to the DOJ asking about what it is doing to combat AI-generated sexually exploitative images of children.

Theyre asking Garland about whether his department has "the necessary authority" to crack down on the growing issue and whether "gaps in the current criminal code" make it harder for law enforcement officials to pursue those who create and possess AI-generated CSAM. The lawmakers are also asking the DOJ to launch an internal inquiry into the troubling material.

"The first reports of AI being used to exploit children for the purpose of generating CSAM surfaced in 2019, when it was revealed that AI could generate obscene, personalized images of minors under the age of 18," they said.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at a press conference in June. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The lawmakers cited an October 2020 report by the MIT Technology Review that warned of an AI app that was being used to digitally "undress" images of women, predominantly underaged girls.

But AI technology has only grown more widespread and sophisticated since then, with diffusion model apps like Midjourney and DALL-E making it easy for most online users to generate fake images or alter existing ones. Midjourney has banned words related to human anatomy from prompts in an effort to prevent creation of AI-generated pornography.

The Washington Post reported in June that using the AI technology to create CSAM of children who do not exist still violated child pornography laws, according to DOJ officials, but did not mention specific incidents of someone being charged for possession of such items.

TECH COMPANY BOASTS IT CAN PREDICT CRIME WITH SOCIAL MEDIA POLICING THROUGH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

"This report is deeply concerning, and we seek to understand what steps can be taken to address this perverted application of AI," the lawmakers letter said.

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In addition to Good, the letter is also signed by Reps. Ken Buck, R-Colo.; Ben Cline, R-Va.; Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla.; and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., among others.

Earlier this year, the attorneys general of all 50 states wrote to Congress urging it to expand current rules on child pornography to cover AI and set up "an expert commission to study the means and methods of AI that can be used to exploit children specifically."

Fox News Digital reached out to the DOJ for comment.

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GOP lawmakers sound alarm over AI used to sexually exploit children - Fox News

The siren call of AI says, It doesnt have to be this way. And when you consider the billions of people who sit outside the elite club of writer-sufferers, you start to think: Maybe it shouldnt be this way.

May Habib spent her early childhood in Lebanon before moving to Canada, where she learned English as a second language. I thought it was pretty unfair that so much benefit would accrue to someone really good at reading and writing, she says. In 2020, she founded Writer, one of several hybrid platforms that aims not to replace human writing, but to help peopleand, more accurately, brandscollaborate better with AI.

Habib says she believes theres value in the blank page stare-down. It helps you consider and discard ideas and forces you to organize your thoughts. There are so many benefits to going through the meandering, head-busting, wanna-kill-yourself staring at your cursor, she says. But that has to be weighed against the speed of milliseconds.

The purpose of Writer isnt to write for you, she says, but rather to make your writing faster, stronger, and more consistent. That could mean suggesting edits to prose and structure, or highlighting what else has been written on the subject and offering counterarguments. The goal, she says, is to help users focus less on sentence-level mechanics and more on the ideas theyre trying to communicate. Ideally, this process yields a piece of text thats just as human as if the person had written it entirely themselves. If the detector can flag it as AI writing, then youve used the tools wrong, she says.

The black-and-white notion that writing is either human- or AI-generated is already slipping away, says Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, were entering an era of what he calls centaur writing. Sure, asking ChatGPT to spit out an essay about the history of the Mongol Empire produces predictably AI-ish results, he says. But start writing, The details in paragraph three arent quite rightadd this information, and make the tone more like The New Yorker, he says. Then it becomes more of a hybrid work and much better-quality writing.

Mollick, who teaches entrepreneurship at Wharton, not only allows his students to use AI toolshe requires it. Now my syllabus says you have to do at least one impossible thing, he says. If a student cant code, maybe they write a working program. If theyve never done design work, they might put together a visual prototype. Every paper you turn in has to be critiqued by at least four famous entrepreneurs you simulate, he says.

Students still have to master their subject area to get good results, according to Mollick. The goal is to get them thinking critically and creatively: Idont care what tool theyre using to do it, as long as theyre using the tools in a sophisticated manner and using their mind.

Mollick acknowledges that ChatGPT isnt as good as the best human writers. But it can give everyone else a leg up. If you were a bottom-quartile writer, youre in the 60th to 70th percentile now, he says. It also frees certain types of thinkers from the tyranny of the writing process. We equate writing ability with intelligence, but thats not always true, he says. In fact, Id say its often not true.

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The AI Detection Arms Race Is Onand College Students Are ... - WIRED

After laying off 8,000 staffers in January, Salesforce is now planning to hire at least 3,300 employees. The plan includes rehiring some of the former employees.

Salesforce is looking at a large recruitment drive as it plans to invest in new areas such as generative AI and push some of its popular products, such as the Data Cloud, CEO Marc Benioff, and chief operating officer Brian Millham told Bloomberg in an interview.

The company already has made several product enhancements, especially integrating new generative AI features into its Data Cloud.

This week at its annual Dreamforce conference, the company said it has rebuilt its Data Cloud to support generative AI and will begin rolling out the omnipresent chatbot to some customers by year-end.

In August, Salesforce released a newno-code, interface-based AI andgenerative AImodel training tool, dubbed Einstein Studio, as part of its Data Cloud offering.

Earlier in June, Salesforce showcased a new offering, dubbed AI Cloud, which combines its previously announced Slack GPT, Tableau GPT,Apex GPT, MuleSoft GPT, Flow GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, and Commerce GPT along with the new Einstein Trust layer and a prompt engineering tool for traininglarge language models (LLMs).

The new hires, according to Millham, will be divided between sales, engineering, and the team handling the development of its Data Cloud.

The top executives said that some of the new positions are more likely to be filled by what the company terms as boomerang hires. These are essentially employees who worked at Salesforce earlier before moving to other companies.

Salesforce sees boomerang hires as a new success metric, the top executives said, adding that there still might be strategic layoffs in the future.

Strategic layoffs, such as trading non-technical staff for more engineering and technical talent, could become common for most large technology companies. This week, Google-parent Alphabet laid off hundreds of HR employees citing less demand for such staff within the company for the next few quarters.

The plan to hire 3,300 new employees by Salesforce is expected to restore nearly 40% of the staff laid off during the 10% workforce reduction in January.

Salesforce, which had nearly80,000 global employeesas of February 2022, currently employs about 70,000 staffers after eliminating at least 8,000 roles in January citing reduced customer spending due to macroeconomic uncertainty.

Just two months before the downsizing, the company decided to reduce at least 950 roles despite it experiencing a relatively successful year financially, with the companys second-quarterrevenue rising 22%year on year, driven by the rapid adoption of its cloud-basedCRMand other sales management tools.

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Salesforce to hire 3,300 staffers as it eyes generative AI opportunity - CIO

Retinal imaging allows researchers and physicians to observe small blood vessels whose condition could hint at a health-care issue.Credit: ipm/Alamy

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool capable of diagnosing and predicting the risk of developing multiple health conditions from ocular diseases to heart failure to Parkinsons disease all on the basis of peoples retinal images.

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AI tools have been trained to detect disease using retinal images before, but what makes the new tool called RETFound special is that it was developed using a method known as self-supervised learning. That means that the researchers did not have to analyse each of the 1.6 million retinal images used for training and label them as normal or not normal, for instance. Such procedures are time-consuming and expensive, and are needed during the development of most standard machine-learning models.

Instead, the scientists used a method similar to the one used to train large-language models such as ChatGPT. That AI tool harnesses myriad examples of human-generated text to learn how to predict the next word in a sentence from the context of the preceding words. In the same kind of way, RETFound uses a multitude of retinal photos to learn how to predict what missing portions of images should look like.

Over the course of millions of images, the model somehow learns what a retina looks like and what all the features of a retina are, says Pearse Keane, an ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London who co-authored a paper published today in Nature1 describing the tool. This forms the cornerstone of the model, and classifies it as what some call a foundation model, which means that it can be adapted for many tasks.

A persons retinas can offer a window into their health, because they are the only part of the human body through which the capillary network, made up of the smallest blood vessels, can be observed directly. If you have some systemic cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, which is affecting potentially every blood vessel in your body, we can directly visualize [that] in retinal images, Keane says.

Scientists used ChatGPT to generate an entire paper from scratch but is it any good?

Retinas are also an extension of the central nervous system, sharing similarities with the brain, which means that retinal images can be used to evaluate neural tissue. The rub is that a lot of the time people dont have the expertise to interpret these scans. This is where AI comes in, Keane says.

Once they had pre-trained RETFound on those 1.6 million unlabelled retinal images, Keane and his colleagues could then introduce a small number of labelled images say, 100 retinal images from people who had developed Parkinsons and 100 from people who had not to teach the model about specific conditions. Having learnt from all the unlabelled images what a retina should look like, Keane says, the model is able to easily learn the retinal features associated with a disease.

Using unlabelled data to initially train the model unblocks a major bottleneck for researchers, says Xiaoxuan Liu, a clinical researcher who studies responsible innovation in AI at the University of Birmingham, UK. Radiologist Curtis Langlotz, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging at Stanford University, in California, agrees. High-quality labels for medical data are extremely expensive, so label efficiency has become the coin of the realm, he says.

The system performed well at detecting ocular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. On a scale where 0.5 represents a model that performs no better than a random prediction and 1 represents a perfect model that makes an accurate prediction each time, it scored between 0.822 and 0.943 for diabetic retinopathy, depending on the data set used. When predicting the risk for systemic diseases such as heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and Parkinsons the overall performance was limited, but still superior to that of other AI models.

RETFound is so far one of the few successful applications of a foundation model to medical imaging, Liu says.

Researchers are now looking ahead to what other types of medical imaging the techniques used to develop RETFound might be applied to. It will be interesting to see whether these methods generalize to more complex images, Langlotz says for example, to magnetic resonance images or computed tomography scans, which are often three- or even four-dimensional.

Is the world ready for ChatGPT therapists?

The authors have made the model publicly available, and hope that groups around the world will be able to adapt and train it to work for their own patient populations and medical settings. They could potentially take this algorithm and fine-tune it, using data from their own country to have something thats more optimized for their use, Keane says.

This is tremendously exciting, Liu says. But using RETFound as the basis for other models to detect diseases comes with a risk, she adds. Thats because any limitations embedded in the tool could leak into future models that are built from it. It is now up to the authors of RETFound to ensure its ethical and safe usage, including transparent communication of its limitations, so that it can be a true community asset.

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AI detects eye disease and risk of Parkinson's from retinal images - Nature.com