Given the many unknowns about large language models and potential for powerful but flawed chatbots to cause trouble, Google should consider inviting outsiders to do more than just try limited demos of LaMDA, says Sameer Singh, a fellow at Allen Institute for AI and [ICS associate] professor at University of California, Irvine. “There has to be more conversation about how they’re making this safe and testing so outsiders can contribute to those efforts,” he says.
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Three students from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship: Thanasi Bakis, Pratyush Muthukumar and Samuel Showalter. Two additional ICS students, Mikaela Nishida and Hayden Freedman, received an honorable mention.
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Do you love traveling and exploring new places? Do you love immersing yourself in nature by mountaineering and surfing? Ludovico Verniani does too, so much so that he created an app called Quadra to reward and encourage exploration.
Verniani graduated from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) in 2021 with a B.S. in computer science, and he’s been furthering his passion for programming and technology in recent months by building Quadra. Quadra is a newly launched decentralized app that employs blockchain technology, including web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to get people out and about.
[Read more…]On April 21, 2022, UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) recognized faculty, instructors and teaching assistants at its annual Celebration of Teaching event. This year, three faculty members from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) were recognized:
The UCI Machine Learning (ML) Repository will host its 12-day Machine Learning Hackathon from May 18 to May 29. By participating in the hackathon, students will have the opportunity to work with real-world artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies through the UCI ML Repository.
[Read more…]High school students interested in learning about computer science in a college setting can now apply to UCI’s inaugural Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Summer Academy. For 2022, the ICS Summer Academy will be offering a two-week session titled, “DATA — Data Analytics: Theory & Applications.” From July 25 to Aug. 5, high school students will be on campus Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., exploring the foundations of data science with real-world, hands-on projects.
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It has been five years since UCI hosted its first Internet of Things (IoT) Hackathon, organized through the TIPPERS (Testbed for IoT-based Privacy-Preserving PERvasive Spaces) project, a smart campus initiative originally funded by DARPA. It was there that four undergraduate students came up with the idea of ZotBins, a smart waste bin system that collects data to help make waste management more efficient. “The aim of the project was to create a tool to help with UCI’s zero waste initiatives,” says ZotBins co-founder Owen Yang, who graduated from UCI in 2020 and is now a software test engineer at Mainspring Energy. The project persists to this day, with new members applying their skills in support of technology-based zero waste management.
[Read more…]A multidisciplinary collaboration between ophthalmology researchers and computer scientists at UCI has shown promising results in revealing color in the dark. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Pierre Baldi and students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) teamed up with Clinical Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology Andrew Browne and others from the School of Medicine (SOM) to leverage deep learning (DL) in recreating color images from infrared input images. “Deep Learning to Enable Color Vision in the Dark,” the PLOS ONE paper that Browne and Baldi co-authored with computer science Ph.D. students Ekaterina Deyneka, Francesco Ceccarelli and Siwei Chen, and SOM researchers Josiah To, Jianing Tang and Anderson Vu, outlines their findings.
[Read more…]A popular machine learning podcast, ML Street Talk, recently featured Computer Science Professor Sameer Singh and Ph.D. student Yasaman Razeghi discussing their paper, “Impact of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot Reasoning.” Co-authored with Robert Logan, also a Ph.D. student in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), and Matt Gardner, a principal researcher at Microsoft, the paper suggests that large language models perform well on reasoning tasks not because the models can reason well but maybe because they’ve memorized the dataset.
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Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Michael Franz and a group of current and former Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) recently won the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2022), a flagship venue in system software. The paper, “PKRU-Safe: Automatically Locking Down the Heap Between Safe and Unsafe Languages,” is by Ph.D. students Paul Kirth and Mitchel Dickerson, Immunant CTO Stephen Crane and CEO Per Larsen, postdoctoral researchers Adrian Dabrowski and David Gens, Apple software engineer Yeoul Na, KU Leuven Professor Stijn Volckaert, and Franz.
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