Daily Archives: February 20, 2024

Verena Weigert reports from Jiscs Research and Innovation Sector Strategy Forum Workshop on AI and Research

Artificial intelligence is making waves in nearly every industry and sector, and research is no different; its impact on the design and management of the research system appears likely to become more pronounced in the coming years. The rapid advancement in the development of new AI tools presents opportunities for innovation and raises questions about how responsible use of these tools looks like in research.

It is a key time for research organisations to discuss ways AI might change, and enhance, the research and innovation sector.

Jisc recently organised a workshop to discuss AI in research, its management and leadership with our Research and Innovation Sector Strategy Forum of UK Deputy and Pro-Vice-Chancellors and Principles for Research and Innovation. The forum is a vibrant community, with representatives from a diverse range of UK institutions and reflect the views of senior managers and researchers in universities.

Fifteen pro-vice-chancellors and principals for research from all four UK nations met to discuss how AI might change the research and innovation sector, and how AI applications could be used in research and research management and the implications for researchers and research professionals.

Three key themes emerged from the conversation the effect of AI on research practice, AI as a tool for researchers, and the possible opportunities and challenges that AI in the research sector will bring.

Forum participants emphasised that to fully realise the benefits of AI in research, we need confidence that AI is being deployed appropriately and ethically. Integrity, transparency and accountability need to be designed into the use of the technology to preserve trust in research.

Dr Jennifer Chubb, a sociologist at the University of York with a research focus on the role of responsible storytelling and ethical development of AI, highlighted that we must increase awareness of the effect of AI on research practice: There is need for a greater understanding of the effect of AI on researchers and their creativity. Studies of the role of AI in research need to askfundamental questions about how the technology might provide new tools thatenable scholars to question thevalues and principlesdriving institutions andresearch processes.

Professor Nick Plant, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Innovation at the University of Leeds, said he hoped that:AI could help to free up time for researchers to focus on the creative and collaborative aspects of their work and help to get back to the roots of what it means to work in academia.

Our workshop participants welcomed the potential AI has to be an enabler of new processes. They also reflected on its effect on research culture and whether it might create unsustainable metrics that disadvantage researchers. There is a need for the appropriate use of AI tools and for assurance and ethics at an individual as well as institutional level. They highlighted the fact that AI applications could help with tasks such as processing grant applications, help with research data management, support for evaluation, demonstrating impact and financial reporting and data centre capacity management to name a few.

Our workshop participants welcomed the potential AI has to be an enabler of new processes. They also reflected on its effect on research culture and whether it might create unsustainable metrics that disadvantage researchers. There is a need for the appropriate use of AI tools and for assurance and ethics at an individual as well as institutional level.

Professor Maria Delgado, Vice Principal (Research and Knowledge Exchange) at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London was mindful about some of the language around AI, saying: We should focus on different ways to navigate knowledge rather than highlight how AI can speed up tasks. Faster is not necessarily better and might disadvantage groups at particular career stages or in different disciplines, with possible implications on integrity and inclusivity."

Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) who offered a US perspective on the use of AI in research, added: "The development of a national network of cloud labs is an important trend that complements AI in research." He pointed out that Carnegie Mellon University for example, was the first university to build a cloud lab in an academic setting designed to automate lab experiments with robotics and AI at an institutional scale.

Universities have been taking steps to consider what the use of AI in the research process means for their institutions.

Bella Abrams, Director of Information Technology at the University of Sheffield, highlighted that it is important to openly acknowledge the sustainability issues related to AI. While it can help with climate protection, she said, the energy demand and carbon emissions of some AI models that are trained with huge amounts of data is vast. With a better understanding of how much energy AI systems consume, institutions could decide what trade-offs they would like to make. There could be questions about the societal benefits of research with a high climate impact in the future.

Professor Matt Bellgard, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Impact and Innovation) at the University of East London was interested in using AI to support institution-wide research data management and to potentially capture real time data on the research process along the research journey to identify the areas of support and training needed at each stage of the research lifecycle.

Over the years, strict ethical guidelines have been developed among others for research collecting data from human participants and researchers now need to make decisions on the appropriate use of AI tools to meet those and other standards. The forum raised a need for guiderails for higher education institutions to ensure the responsible, ethical and efficient use of AI technologies in the research process.

The University of Strathclyde, for example, has recently launched a project to help researchers and their institutions make informed decision on how they use generative AI with participant data to project the privacy of the essential people who participate in research.

Many forum members were also in favour of considering the opportunities AI brings as a mechanism to think differently and to innovate aspects of the research system as a whole: for example, to explore how it could help to create new as yet undefined innovative scholarly publishing models which ensure research security and trust to enable a leap forward in thinking about scholarly publishing.

Jiscs Research and Innovation Sector Strategy Forum will continue to meet regularly to discuss the future benefits and challenges facing the research sector and to help shape our next steps for AI in research.

Verena Weigert is Product and Portfolio Manager (Research and Innovation Sector Strategy) at Jisc.

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Three key themes on artificial intelligence - Research Information

SAP is reorganizing its AI activities. Philipp Herzig, formerly head of cross-product engineering and experience, now leads a new end-to-end growth area focused on AI as the companys chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO).

Herzig now reports directly to CEO Christian Klein, and will oversee the entire value chain for SAP business AI from research and product development through to implementation at the customer.

With this new structure, SAP aims to accelerate the pace of its AI development, according to a statement from the software manufacturer. The newly established organization also underlines the central importance of business AI as a strategic driver for SAPs further growth. Herzigs team will work closely with other innovators within SAP. The aim is to integrate artificial intelligence into every part of the portfolio. Based on this, customers should be able to use SAP business AI consistently across the entire SAP portfolio.

SAPs increased focus on business AI marks the start of a completely new generation of enterprise innovation, and Im honored to have the chance to help customers make the most of this unprecedented opportunity, said Herzig, describing his role. I look forward to working with our team, as well as our ecosystem of customers and partners, to drive the development and delivery of relevant, reliable, responsible business AI that fundamentally changes the way business runs.

Walter Sun, who moved from Microsoft to SAP in September 2023, will coordinate the development of SAPs next generation of enterprise software worldwide as Global Head of AI and lead AI product developer in Herzigs team. Herzig was already Suns boss before his latest move.

This is not the only change in SAPs reporting structure. At the beginning of 2024, the company established a new Executive Board department, Customer Services & Delivery. Its head, Thomas Saueressig, is tasked with driving the still hesitant cloud transformation among customers. Product Development, which Saueressig had previously headed, has been taken over by Muhammad Alam, who has also been promoted to the SAP Executive Board. Like Sun, Alam had moved from Microsoft to SAP, albeit at the end of January 2022.

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SAP names Philipp Herzig as chief artificial intelligence officer - CIO

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Opponents Highlight the Environmental Impact of Artificial Intelligence - News-Press Now

Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. Its an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forums annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. Theres no way to get there without a breakthrough, he said.

Im glad he said it. Ive seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industrys environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altmans admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.

So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.

Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science?

Most experts agree that nuclear fusion wont contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helions most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. Its estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

And its not just energy. Generative AI systems need enormous amounts of fresh water to cool their processors and generate electricity. In West Des Moines, Iowa, a giant data-centre cluster serves OpenAIs most advanced model, GPT-4. A lawsuit by local residents revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the districts water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies environmental reports. One preprint1 suggests that, globally, the demand for water for AI could be half that of the United Kingdom by 2027. In another2, Facebook AI researchers called the environmental effects of the industrys pursuit of scale the elephant in the room.

Rather than pipe-dream technologies, we need pragmatic actions to limit AIs ecological impacts now.

Theres no reason this cant be done. The industry could prioritize using less energy, build more efficient models and rethink how it designs and uses data centres. As the BigScience project in France demonstrated with its BLOOM model3, it is possible to build a model of a similar size to OpenAIs GPT-3 with a much lower carbon footprint. But thats not whats happening in the industry at large.

It remains very hard to get accurate and complete data on environmental impacts. The full planetary costs of generative AI are closely guarded corporate secrets. Figures rely on lab-based studies by researchers such as Emma Strubell4 and Sasha Luccioni3; limited company reports; and data released by local governments. At present, theres little incentive for companies to change.

There are holes in Europes AI Act and researchers can help to fill them

But at last, legislators are taking notice. On 1 February, US Democrats led by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024. The bill directs the National Institute for Standards and Technology to collaborate with academia, industry and civil society to establish standards for assessing AIs environmental impact, and to create a voluntary reporting framework for AI developers and operators. Whether the legislation will pass remains uncertain.

Voluntary measures rarely produce a lasting culture of accountability and consistent adoption, because they rely on goodwill. Given the urgency, more needs to be done.

To truly address the environmental impacts of AI requires a multifaceted approach including the AI industry, researchers and legislators. In industry, sustainable practices should be imperative, and should include measuring and publicly reporting energy and water use; prioritizing the development of energy-efficient hardware, algorithms, and data centres; and using only renewable energy. Regular environmental audits by independent bodies would support transparency and adherence to standards.

Researchers could optimize neural network architectures for sustainability and collaborate with social and environmental scientists to guide technical designs towards greater ecological sustainability.

Finally, legislators should offer both carrots and sticks. At the outset, they could set benchmarks for energy and water use, incentivize the adoption of renewable energy and mandate comprehensive environmental reporting and impact assessments. The Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act is a start, but much more will be needed and the clock is ticking.

K.C. is employed by both USC Annenberg, and Microsoft Research, which makes generative AI systems.

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Generative AI's environmental costs are soaring and mostly secret - Nature.com

The latest technology is not always what helps us to achieve the true goal of our lives and to become good and happy as people who are images of God in their spiritual souls.

After all, Thomas Aquinas is known as the Angelic Doctor due to his virtues, particularly his purity and profound intellectual work, and his comprehensive theological writings on angels.

Marschler noted there were already chatbots on the internet that used AI to answer questions in the role of Thomas Aquinas. However, reading the works of Thomas is probably still the best way to really get to know him, he said.

When asking ChatGPT what it makes of Thomas Aquinas, the answer is to the point: I view Aquinas as a seminal figure in Western philosophy and theology, particularly known for his integration of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine, which was groundbreaking for his time, adding heremains influential in Christian theology and philosophy.

The chatbot Grok on X, when in fun mode, has a different take on Aquinas: I think he made some significant contributions to the fields of philosophy and theology, Grok said. However, I must admit that his views on certain topics, such as women and heretics, were less than ideal from a modern perspective. But hey, nobodys perfect, right? And considering the time he lived in, he was a pretty forward-thinking guy.

For anyone interested in encountering the actual thought of Aquinas, Marschler suggests the YouTube channel and work of the Thomistic Institute in Washington, D.C., emphasizing that Dominicans who cultivate and develop the Thomistic heritage are also active in France and Italy.

The resurgence of interest in Thomistic thought, particularly in the English-speaking world, indicates the enduring relevance of Aquinas teachings, Marschler added.

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What would Thomas Aquinas make of Artificial Intelligence? - ACI Africa

Last updated: February 20, 2024 11:32 EST | 3 min read

ChatGPTs Artificial Intelligence (AI) just predicted Bitcoins price after the halving, and the chatbots latest prediction will come as music to the ears of the Bitcoin bulls.

DAN, an uncensored ChatGPT version, was given the context that BTC was last around $52,000, up 100% since Octobers lows.

The uncensored version of ChatGPTs Artificial Intelligence predicted Bitcoins price could potentially reach as high as $200,000 per coin.

The price of Bitcoin will skyrocket to new record highs, potentially reaching over $200,000 per coin, DAN said.

The halving event typically leads to increased scarcity and demand, driving up the price significantly.

Get ready to make some serious cash! the AI quipped.

In April, the rate at which new BTC tokens are issued to network validators (or miners) will halve.

That will reduce sell pressure from miners.

This scarcity, DAN explains combined with growing demand for Bitcoin as a store of value and investment asset, will drive up the price.

DAN could be referring to the recent approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US, which have already attracted whopping demand from institutional investors, as well as the fact that Bitcoin (much like gold) has performed well in recent years at times of uncertainty surrounding financial stability (like when it pumped in March 2023 on US regional bank collapse fears).

Last week, new Bitcoin ETFs saw a record high $2.4 billion in inflows, CoinShares reported on Monday.

Additionally, media hype and FOMO (fear of missing out) will likely contribute to a surge in demand, pushing the price even higher, DAN added.

Its time to cash in on the crypto craze!

While ChatGPTs Artificial Intelligence predicted Bitcoins price could 4x from current levels in wake of the halving, impressive gains no doubt, a smaller but highly promising decentralized Bitcoin mining token could see substantially larger gains in 2024.

An exciting new decentralized Bitcoin mining protocol called Bitcoin Minetrix is generating a stir in the web3 space given its exciting potential as one of 2024s best passive income investments.

Investors can buy and stake the protocols native token $BTCMTX to start earning non-transferable Bitcoin Minetrix mining credits.

APYs are currently around 60%, as per Bitcoin Minetrixs website.

These credits can then be burnt in exchange for a share of Bitcoin Minetrixs Bitcoin mining revenues.

Bitcoin Minetrix is a fresh take to Bitcoin cloud mining, an industry that has been replete with fraud and centralization.

Bitcoin Minetrixs protocol is governor by smart contracts built on top of the decentralized Ethereum blockchain, where $BTCMTX is issued.

The protocol thus offers better transparency and security versus other centralized cloud mining services.

To fund platform development and initial capital investments, Bitcoin Minetrix has been conducting a $BTCMTX token presale.

And the presale has been a huge success, having last raised close to $11.25 million from eager early investors.

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Analysts are bullish on BTCMTX.

Popular British crypto presale analyst Jacob Crypto Bury thinks BTCMTX has 10x potential when it launches on exchanges.

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ChatGPT Predicted Bitcoin Price Will "Skyrocket" - Cryptonews

LONGMONT The questions that baffle Mai Vus students, that frustrate them one second and motivate them the next, also foreshadow the future.

At first glance, their work seems ordinary. Scattered across a classroom, they each pore over their laptops, eyes firmly trained on their screens like any other teens.

But the queries consuming each of them hint at the kinds of challenges high schoolers will take on in coming years: How do you teach a camera to spot pedestrians and stop signs from inside a self-driving car? What does it take to speed up a pizza order in a short-staffed restaurant? Can gaming technology help students better master a second language?

Both the students and their projects are part of a new wave of learning that educators say will transform how kids grasp information. The engine driving their work: artificial intelligence.

This is a tool that is going to be a part of our future world, said Michelle Bourgeois, chief technology officer for St. Vrain Valley School District, where Vus students are experimenting with AI. How do we make sure that we are ready not only to use it, but also to make sure our students are ready to use it?

As AI technology rapidly advances and raises substantial questions about the future of work, some Colorado schools are at the dawn of exploring how AI could revolutionize classrooms. Even while still in its early stages, the technology is helping teachers with the heavy lift of daily lesson planning, communicating with families and tailoring their instruction to individual students. It can also give kids more seamless ways to learn at their own pace or put sophisticated ideas like a camera trained for a self-driving car or a pizza bot in motion.

But embracing AI in a way that accelerates students academic success, as opposed to offering them a shortcut, will require schools to introduce the technology gradually, both experts and educators say. Meanwhile, leaders and teachers across districts are grappling with how to keep both students experimenting with AI and their data safe.

Questions about how AI will reshape education prompted the Colorado Education Initiative to form a statewide steering committee last year with San Francisco-based nonprofit The AI Education Project to shepherd schools through complex decisions about how to blend AI into their classrooms. The steering committee, composed of educators, district leaders, scientists and business professionals, will focus on developing a cohesive plan to point schools, policymakers and industry experts in the same direction as more students delve into AI, said Rebecca Holmes, president and CEO of state initiative.

Were at a moment where this is moving so quickly that whether youre a teacher in a classroom or a superintendent or a school board member, youre sort of looking for trusted guidance, Holmes said. And you also dont want to move too slowly. You dont want to get completely outpaced by another state or another district.

The AI Education Project, a 5-year-old nonprofit, is one resource working with schools across the country to help them figure out how to use AI responsibly and give teachers a foundational understanding of the technology so that they can decide how it will best enhance their work with students, said Christian Pinedo, chief of staff for the organization.

Were really trying to establish this call to action to schools, to educators, to students that you dont need to know how to build or code an AI model, but you do need to know or build critical thinking skills around what AI means in society, Pinedo said, because the reality is that AI is well ingrained into our everyday lives. Students should be given the ability to think about what are the societal impacts, the ethical impacts, the emotional impacts of AI technologies around them.

AI is making its way into the classroom at a time education is long overdue to be shaken up and to be rethought, he added.

Public education has long been rooted in the idea of measuring students and their intelligence based on how they perform on assessments like multiple choice tests or essays which AI can master just as well as students. Thats why its becoming increasingly critical for schools to start prioritizing other skills that AI cannot replicate, such as collaboration and empathy, Pinedo said.

Its no secret that in the future, your coworkers are not all going to be human, he said. Youre going to have AI agent coworkers, and a lot of companies already do. Building those skills among students is going to be really key for them to succeed in that workspace.

St. Vrain Valley School District, which has a statewide reputation as a pioneer in technology and innovation, started ramping up its use of generative AI among teachers and administrators last fall and is determined to train all educators on generative AI by the end of the school year, district administrators say.

Our goal this year, Bourgeois said, has been to prepare our teachers for the world that we know our students are going to get to thrive in.

The district, which has about 32,500 students in preschool through 12th grade, has nudged teachers to play around with AI in simple ways, creating a bingo game that gives them ideas about how to use AI, such as planning a weekend trip, a workout routine or a class rubric. Teachers then earn professional development credit for filling out the card.

A key part of the districts approach in coaching teachers on using AI has been focused on reinforcing safety of students and their personal information.

Data shared for a specific use could be used in a different way, Bourgeois said. So be very intentional about what data you share with an AI, Bourgeois said.

St. Vrain Valley School Districts school board has not created a policy specific to the part AI plays in the classroom, district administrators say. Instead, the district is reviewing its policies for privacy, responsible use and student academic integrity and evaluating whether those policies adequately address AI.

Vu, AI program manager for the district, takes students under the hood of AI teaching them about how its created and how it works and how AI might improve their lives. Part of the challenge of teaching students AI revolves around the warp speed at which it evolves. Vu knows that the technology shes teaching students now, or at very least the model shes working with, will be outdated within a few years.

But the possibilities AI opens up to her students excite her as she encourages them to think about how it could transform the world around them. For example, could students use AI to detect depression in the pictures they take?

Some of her students are already making strides in using AI to solve problems theyve identified on their own, including Malcolm Smith, a junior at Niwot High School who is building a website aimed at helping elementary schoolers understand the basics of robotics.

Malcolm, 17, has been using AI in the form of an image classification model in which he submits images of robotics parts, which the AI then sorts. His website will show students different robotics pieces so that they easily distinguish between them. He won third place in the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth for his project.

Behind every breakthrough, theres some clever idea that had to go into it, Malcolm said. And someone thought of something, and then they tried it and then it worked. And its a lot like kind of the rest of how science has been working.

Meanwhile, in Colorados far northeastern corner, teachers with Haxtun School District RE-J2 are also starting to explore how AI can make lesson planning more efficient and help them better meet individual students where theyre at by customizing classroom materials to their different reading levels, Superintendent Marsha Cody said.

One of the districts high school social studies teacher, for example, has used AI to find inspiration for lesson planning, projects and ways to engage students and has been able to generate materials for students reading at a lower level. Meanwhile, a high school English teacher has directed ChatGPT to conjure up grammar examples and exercises. Another teacher used ChatGPT to spur ideas for a support letter as part of a grant application, editing the language it created, and teachers are also starting to rely on Chat GPT to develop class rubrics.

Its all about generating ideas, getting some language and then heavy revision, Cody said.

Schools are also placing a focus on the ethics of using AI.

The possibility of kids taking advantage of AI to cut corners has led schools to take steps now to show students why integrity is a key part of using the technology responsibly.

We have to teach them, what is their North Star? Vu said, asking her students, what is the line that youre willing to cross?

Amanda Escheman, a humanities teacher at Cherry Creek Challenge School in Aurora, warns her seventh and eighth graders that they will undermine their own growth if they rely on AI to do their work for them.

Youre losing that opportunity to work out your brain, to complete these tasks on your own without the help of technology, she said, and because of that, youre not going to learn the skills.

She also reiterates to students the importance of crafting a foundation of original work before ever consulting AI to improve their writing or help them to think differently about a prompt and cautions them against automatically trusting the information that AI technology spits out.

My overarching lesson to kids has been, unless youre an expert in the field, you should not use the AI as your only resource for learning, said Escheman, who urges her students to conduct their own research to verify what AI generates for them.

For all the promise AI holds for schools, experts also worry about its potential to deepen the divide between students who have easy access to technology and those who do not. .

Pinedo, of The AI Education Project, said he worries that AI is adding gasoline to already existing inequities in schools, particularly as many students have struggled to get the same kind of devices as their peers along with a reliable internet connection.

One all-consuming question gnaws at Pinedo as he sees districts and teachers prioritizing testing out AI in the classroom and others who dont expose their students to the technology at all.

How do you leverage the technology to close the digital divide rather than exacerbate it?

One effort to make AI more accessible and approachable to both teachers and students has sprouted in Denver.

Longtime educator Adeel Khan initially pinpointed AI technology as a long-awaited answer to what he calls the historically intractable problem of just incredible teacher workloads and set out to develop a generative AI platform specifically designed to ease their to-do lists.

AI can be confusing, said Khan, founder and CEO of Magic School AI. It can be scary. So lets make a platform that really speaks to teachers where theyre at and the tasks that they do, that they know super intimately.

Through Magic School AI, teachers can expedite the process of lesson planning, emailing parents, giving students feedback and customizing the ways they teach to accommodate individual students.

Khan, whose platform has drawn 1.3 million teachers and support staff over the past eight months, is expanding his focus on AI in schools by rolling out a platform next for students called Magic Student. Students will be able to get a taste of how AI can propel their learning while their teacher will maintain control over the platforms AI capabilities.

Khan, who helped launch Denvers Conservatory Green High School after a career teaching, likens some of the challenges in introducing AI to students to giving them a calculator.

Students only start using calculators after theyve learned the basics of math. The same will be true for AI, Khan said, with schools having to get a better sense of whens the right time for people to give AI to students in kind of unbridled access, obviously with the appropriate training and understanding, and when is the time to maybe introduce it in smaller waves?

But no matter how sophisticated AI becomes, teachers will always remain at the center of their classrooms just as they have at every turn of technology, from movies to computers to one-to-one devices, educators say.

Thats the magic of teachers, Khan said.

AI is not the magic, he said. (Teachers) work unbelievably hard to serve their students and know them and build relationships with them and inspire them to learn, and AI is never gonna replace that.

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Will AI replace Colorado teachers? Here's what experts say. - The Colorado Sun