UCI News: “UCI researchers use deep learning to identify gene regulation at single-cell level” (Xiaohui Xie quoted)

Deep learning, a family of machine-learning methods based on artificial neural networks, has revolutionized applications such as image interpretation, natural language processing and autonomous driving. In a study published recently in Science Advances, UCI researchers describe how the technique can also be successfully used to observe gene regulation at the cellular level. Until now, that process had been limited to tissue-level analysis.

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TWIML AI Podcast: “Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with Sameer Singh”

Sameer’s work centers on large-scale and interpretable machine learning applied to information extraction and natural language processing. We caught up with Sameer right after he was awarded the best paper award at ACL 2020 for his work on Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList. In our conversation, we explore CheckLists, the task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models introduced in the paper. We also discuss how well we understand the cause of pitfalls or failure modes in deep learning models, Sameer’s thoughts on embodied AI, and his work on the now famous LIME paper, which he co-authored alongside Carlos Guestrin.

Listen below or at the TWIML AI Podcast.

Nature: “Millions of students are returning to US universities in a vast unplanned pandemic experiment” (Sharad Mehrotra quoted)

At the University of California, Irvine, campus managers will keep an eye on how crowded buildings are, using a system that has been under development for years with a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As students’ phones and laptops search for Wi-Fi signals in buildings, they generate ‘probe events’ that will be used to estimate how many people are in each area.

Read the full story at Nature.

Education Dive: “Colleges look to apps that screen for virus symptoms and trace contacts” (Nalini Venkatasubramanian and Sharad Mehrotra quoted)

At the University of California, Irvine, a team of researchers is hoping to put those [privacy] concerns to rest by developing a web-based app that uses data the school already collects. Instead of requiring students and employees to turn over troves of personal information, the system works by tracking the number of devices connected to the campus Wi-Fi. To avoid overcounting people, it uses machine learning techniques to determine if two or more devices are moving together, suggesting they belong to the same person.

Read the full story at Education Dive.

Forbes: “Covid Crimes: Espionage, Hackers And Why America Is Vulnerable” (Bryan Cunningham quoted)

With millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake, the U.S. is in a dangerous place when it comes to vulnerabilities associated with the pandemic – one of which is cybersecurity. To understand just what we’re facing, Forbes asked Bryan Cunningham, long-time cybersecurity and privacy lawyer and Founding Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, exactly what’s going on, what the focus should be, and what precautions Americans should be taking.

Read the full story at Forbes.

VentureBeat: “AI researchers create testing tool to find bugs in NLP from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft”

AI researchers have created a language-model testing tool that has discovered major bugs in commercially available cloud AI offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yesterday, a paper detailing the CheckList tool received the Best Paper award from organizers of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference. The ACL conference, which took place online this week, is one of the largest annual gatherings for researchers creating language models.

Read the full article at VentureBeat.

UCI News: “UCI researchers use campus as test bed for coronavirus contact tracing system”

Who among us does not value a good, reliable Wi-Fi signal? For researchers at the University of California, Irvine, that appreciation goes further: They want to use the campus’s connectivity to help combat the spread of COVID-19.

A team in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences recently received a rapid funding award from the National Science Foundation to explore the deployment of the university’s wireless network as part of a coronavirus contact tracing application. The promise of the project, according to its lead researchers, is that it will provide enhanced situational awareness to participants while preserving their anonymity.

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