Friday, January 24, in the A. Ray Olpin Student Union Ballroom. 229 students, faculty members, University staff members, and attendees from the general public gathered in the A. Ray Olpin Student Union ballroom on Friday, January 24, for The Utah Center for Data Science’s annual Data Science & AI day.

Keeping Us Posted

The event began with 10 research poster presentations from current students sharing their knowledge with peers and professors alike. Simultaneously, partners with University Career Success hosted a Data Science & AI Career Fair, connecting students with professionals across the Silicon Slopes as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Dieter Fox of Nvidia & U Washington

The public has witnessed huge advances in generative artificial intelligence, including large language models, chatbots, and image and video generation tools. How has this progress impacted robotics?

This is the question that Dieter Fox, Senior Director of Robotics Research at Nvidia and University of Washington Professor, captivated the attendees while addressing during his keynote. Professor Fox identified large scale data as a primary ingredient to recent advances in generative AI. He then proposed several directions for generating large scale data for robot learning, focusing on his work in using large scale, parallelized simulation as the primary tool to enable massive data generation. He also discussed how this could be combined with human demonstrations. His keynote concluded by demonstrating exciting recent advances achieved using these techniques and gave his thoughts on how neural network architectures should evolve to further their use in robotics.

Research Highlights

The afternoon session culminated with research highlights from across the University who have practically applied data science & AI within their work.

Assistant Professor Ziad Al-Halah’s (Kahlert School of Computing) section “AI in Computer Vision” regarded spatial features in the audio-visual medium.

Associate Professor Xiaoyue Cathy Liu’s (Civil & Environmental Engineering) section “DS of Human Mobility” discussed AI applications for traffic patterns and safety.

Research Assistant Professor Shiqi Yu (Physics and Astronomy) closed out the day’s presentations with her “ML for Astronomy” section.