Improving Pedestrian Safety through Traffic Video Analytics: A use case of combining AI, HPC for smart city
Nov. 10, 2020, All Day
In this talk, we present an ongoing collaboration with the City of Austin on assessing pedestrian road usage. The project uses high performance computing resources at TACC and artificial intelligence to analyze traffic cameras owned by the City of Austin. We explore qualitative and quantitative metrics to describe pedestrian activity and corresponding changes, which may be used to prioritize the deployment of pedestrian safety solutions, or evaluate their performance. Please email goodsystems@austin.utexas.edu to receive the meeting link.
Presentation hosted by the Smart Cities Consortium.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Racial Justice
Nov. 6, 2020, All Day
Explore the intersection between technology, AI and racial justice in this panel featuring School of Information assistant professor Min Kyung Lee, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering professor Chandra Bhat and School of Journalism and Media professor S. Craig Watkins.
Machine Learning Lab Talk: Algorithmic Foundations for the Diffraction Limit
Nov. 6, 2020, All Day
For more than a century and a half it has been widely-believed that the physics of diffraction imposes certain fundamental limits on the resolution of an optical system. However our understanding of what exactly can and cannot be resolved has never risen above heuristic arguments which, even worse, appear contradictory.
In this work we remedy this gap by studying the diffraction limit as a statistical inverse problem and, based on connections to provable algorithms for learning mixture models, we rigorously prove upper and lower bounds on how many photons we need (and how precisely we need to record their locations) to resolve closely-spaced point sources. Moreover we show the emergence of a phase transition, which helps explain why the diffraction limit can be broken in some domains but not in others.
This is based on joint work with Sitan Chen. Join us via this Zoom webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85064165756
Social Media, Propaganda, and Elections
Nov. 2, 2020, All Day
Explore the ways in which social media and other digital platforms are used as tools for spreading propaganda, disinformation and politically motivated harassment. Good Systems Research Director Dr. Sam Woolley from the Moody College of Communication will provide examples from the 2020 election and other international political events to support his research and findings. Learn more and register.
Planet Texas 2050 Fall Research Showcase Series - Texas Metro Observatory, Texas Futures Virtual Reality, and Hurricane Predictive Modeling
Oct. 28, 2020, 12:01 to 1:01 p.m.
As part of the Planet Texas 2050 Fall Research Showcase Series, join us to hear talks on:
“Texas Metro Observatory (TMO)” [Team: Katherine Lieberknecht (project lead – Architecture), Patrick Bixler (LBJ School of Public Affairs), Juliana Felkner (Architecture), Fernanda Leite (CAEE), Michael Oden (Architecture), Steven Richter (Architecture); and Nicole Joslin and Marla Torrado (CPW)]
“Texas Futures Virtual Reality Experience” [Team: Fernanda Leite (project lead – CAEE), Megan (MJ) Johns (Arts & Entertainment Technologies), and Andrew Solis (TACC)]
“Hurricane-Resilient Healthcare Infrastructure Modeling with Integrated Flood Prediction and Stochastic Logistics Optimization” [Team: Erhan Kutanoglu (Mechanical Engineering), Zong-Liang Yang (JGS), and John Hasenbein (Mechanical Engineering)]
Register now.
Urban Health Risk Mapping--Measuring the impact of neighborhood environments on personal health
Oct. 27, 2020, All Day
This project developed an AI system that can measure the health effects of neighborhood environments in ten major US cities using citizen crowd-sourced data. The research team mapped the computed health risk scores at the census tract-level for all selected municipalities and also built an interactive website that allows users to understand how changes to their neighborhoods can affect their health. Register now.
Presentation hosted by the Smart Cities Consortium.
Disinformation Network Talks Fall 2020 - Audience-building for disinformation actors: How Russian IRA accounts use elite interactions to grow their followership
Oct. 22, 2020, All Day
The Good Systems Disinformation Network invites you to hear a presentation from Josephine Lukito (School of Journalism and Media). She will walk through how some of the most well-known and popular IRA accounts grew their followership, focusing specifically on engagement with partisan-aligned verified accounts and news media contributed to more followers for IRA accounts. This work builds upon her previous research regarding cross-platform disinformation spread (see CJR piece and Quartz piece). Register here.
AI & The Future of Work
Oct. 20, 2020, All Day
With AI emerging so rapidly, how will new AI applications and uses—including autonomous systems—change the workforce, and how do we ensure the future workforce is empowered, inclusive, and equitable? Join Sherri Greenberg and Chris Shenefiel as they explain how AI works, why it is revolutionary in terms of work, how work will be forever changed by it, and what we must do to develop ‘good’ AI systems for all our benefit. Learn more and register.
First Annual Symposium of Good Systems—A UT Grand Challenge
Oct. 19, 2020, All Day
Join us as we examine how our grand challenge work to date has brought us closer to our mission of designing ethical AI technologies, as well as what steps we need to take going forward.
Planet Texas 2050 Fall Research Showcase Series - Burkholderia Species and DOLCe
Oct. 13, 2020, 12:01 to 1:01 p.m.
As part of the Planet Texas 2050 Fall Research Showcase Series, join us to hear talks on:
“Geospatial Analysis of Environmental Suitability for Establishing Burkholderia Species in Texas” [Team: Stan Roux (Molecular Biosciences), Katherine Brown (Molecular Biosciences), Jessica Trelogan (Libraries), Michael Shensky (Libraries)]
“Digital Object Life Cycle (DOLCe)” [Team: Anna Dabrowski (TACC), Courtney Mumma].
Register now.