Following is a list of things BruinTechs should know and share with others:
1. Announcing the 2022-2023 BruinTech Executive Board!
President - Anna Ahearn
President-Elect - Matthew Geddert
Vice President for Special Projects - Jason Pang
Vice President for Community Events - Sylvia Condro
Vice President for Marketing Communications - Annie Watanabe-Rocco
Vice President for Technology Support - Gillian Bailey
Vice President for Content Strategy - Nicole Lim
Immediate Past President - Andrey Nikolayev
Member at Large - Cody Ashe-McNalley
Member at Large - Paula Miranda
Member at Large - Jim Williamson
Member at Large - Rachel Wong
Member at Large - Sergio Zavaleta
Thank you to the 2021-2022 BruinTech Board for all your hard work serving the UCLA community.
Andrey Nikolayev - President
Anna Ahearn - President-Elect
Ann Watanabe-Rocco - VP for Special Projects
Val Trullinger - VP for Information Systems
Lloyd Nicks - VP for Community Events
Hannah Sutherland - VP for Strategic Communications
Sandy Nguyen - Historian
Mary Watkins - Immediate Past President
Kelly Arruda - BruinTech Program Sponsor
Relvyn Lopez - Project Specialist, IT Services
2. Privacy-preserving camera captures only the objects you want
Over the past decade, digital cameras have become ubiquitous in modern life — embedded in smartphones, smart eyewear, security surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles and facial recognition technologies. And as the sheer amount of image data being captured has grown, so have concerns about privacy protection.
But what if there was a way to take pictures that instantly capture only the objects of relevance in a frame while simultaneously blotting out unnecessary or potentially sensitive details, without the need for any editing, encryption or other digital post-processing work?
3. How AI rendering program Midjourney sees Los Angeles
Freeways. Palm trees. Searing sunsets. That is how Los Angeles is depicted in popular culture. But how might L.A. be imagined by artificial intelligence? Plug “Los Angeles” into a rendering bot, and chances are you’ll get the same aesthetic, since A.I. draws its imagery from what already exists. To avoid the tropes, we turned to literature, poetry and myth to see how Midjourney, the A.I.-powered rendering program, might visualize L.A.’s metaphorical character(s) instead of its literal landscape.
In this visual poem, we stitched together evocative texts about Los Angeles as a way of articulating our city’s bizarre beauty and uncanny oddities. Then we asked A.I. to imagine them. It’s as weird as you might imagine.
4. The CIA Just Invested in Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Technology
Colossal says it hopes to use advanced genetic sequencing to resurrect two extinct mammals — not just the giant, ice age mammoth, but also a mid-sized marsupial known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that died out less than a century ago. On its website, the company vows: “Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat.”
5. Who Can It Be Now: On social platforms, the “fluid self” is not a rejection of personal branding but another manifestation of it
It’s a psychological truism that personal identity is fluid and that its continuity — whatever it is that links the you of today to older versions of yourself — is asserted against a backdrop of flux. Social platforms, however, have distorted and jumbled up the sense of which parts change and which don’t. The many means of expression they provide and the archives they maintain suggest that everything about who we are (and were) may be reimagined and exhibited in an endless array of new formats.
