This Week's Stories:
1. Registration for Virtual Attendance for UC Tech 2023 (July 17-19) is Still Open
Excitement is building for UC Tech 2023: Resilient, Rising & Reinspired quickly approaching on July 17-19 here on the beautiful UC Berkeley campus. As you know, registration for the in-person conference has closed but virtual registration is still available, and all sessions will be available online. Plus, virtual registration is only $75!
Note: The registration link above is for general registration. If you are listed as the primary presenter for a session, a sponsor, workstream lead, UC Tech Ambassador, or a UC Tech Programming Committee member, please do not use the registration link above. Check your inbox for a dedicated link that will allow you to register according to your role.
Activities at UC Tech
In addition to the informative sessions and inspiring keynotes, we have some fun activities planned for you to participate in throughout the conference:
Activities during UC Tech
Things to do on campus and around town
2. Attend Digital Technology UCLA Workshops
Need to learn how to automate a task using Python? Debating which statistical package best suits your research question? Want to visualize your research data as a map? Workshops@UCLA is here to help you find the right technology instruction to advance your research agenda. Read More
- Visualization applications on HPC - July 12 @ 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
- Introduction to Scrivener - July 13 @ 12:00 pm
- Hoffman2 Happy Hour: Running Jupyter notebooks on the Hoffman2 Cluster - July 19 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
- Building and Compiling Software on HPC - July 19 @ 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
- Introduction to DEVONthink - July 20 @ 12:00 pm
- Hoffman2 Happy Hour: Submitting jobs to the Scheduler - July 26 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
- Presentation Strategies and Tools - July 27 @ 11:00 am
- Learning Scikit-Learn - July 28 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
3. How the UCLA College is Harnessing a Titanic New Engine of Equity and Discovery
Can an algorithm help improve outreach to prevent homelessness? A new Los Angeles County program in collaboration with UCLA data scientists at the California Policy Lab is betting $14 million that the answer is yes — the groundbreaking new Homelessness Prevention Unit uses predictive analytics to identify individuals most at risk.
Till von Wachter, professor of economics and faculty director of the California Policy Lab’s UCLA site, explains how the data scientists painstakingly linked 500 different factors of previously siloed, anonymized client data from eight different county agencies. Individuals whose resulting risk profiles closely align with those of previous clients who have become homeless are flagged to receive individualized care from social workers housed in the new L.A. County prevention unit.
4. UCLA Geologists are Using Artificial Intelligence to Predict Landslides
A new technique developed by UCLA geologists that uses artificial intelligence to better predict where and why landslides may occur could bolster efforts to protect lives and property in some of the world’s most disaster-prone areas.
The new method, described in a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, improves the accuracy and interpretability of AI-based machine-learning techniques, requires far less computing power and is more broadly applicable than traditional predictive models.
5. Students’ App for 2028 Olympic Games Wins Inaugural Innovation Challenge
Organizers preparing to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028 are concerned by the declining viewership of the Games over the past decade. The number of primetime viewers on all platforms, including streaming services, has dropped dramatically, from an average of 27 million for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro to just 15.6 million for the 2020 Tokyo Games. The figure fell to 11.4 million for the 2022 Winter Olympics. But now, Ashley Kim and Sanchit Agarwal — seniors who just graduated last week — along with undergraduates Shiyu Ye, Srinjana Sriram, Ruiying Liu, Tori Wang and Zaid Bustami, have devised a digital plan that could help boost participation and engagement among global audiences for the 2028 Games. The students’ app, MedalUp, won gold in this spring quarter’s inaugural Innovation Challenge, a six-week competition organized by UCLA, Amazon Web Services and technology consulting firm Slalom.
