March 2024 - Data Revolution newsletter

Hi folks. Wow another month has flown by and AI is still the flavour of the month! Welcome to another handcrafted email newsletter.

I have been a doing a series of talks about AI, for example with Lenovo in Sydney and Melbourne at their Tech Day 24, and the International Women’s Day session for MIT/Australian Computer Society, that was organised by the amazing Donna-Maree Vinci, talking about the future of data jobs.

As I am seeing it, everyone everywhere is trying to get ready to operationalise AI at scale and safely. It is a big job, and I am hoping to get a perspective on this area for higher education on the podcast soon.

Upcoming Events - AI Confidential

AI Confidential is a series of online seminars where we will spill the tea on all things artificial intelligence in a chill, candid and Chatham House Rule online setting.

Now the first session on 27 March 2024 is already booked out, but please keep an eye out for announcements of future sessions on Eventbrite, LinkedIn and other social platforms (except Facebook as they are dreadful).

The basic premise of this series is that your hosts Kate Carruthers and Kobi Leins, will be running a series of monthly online sessions where we delve into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact across industries. We will be presenting case studies, dissect the latest news, and to ask the questions you don’t dare ask elsewhere in these Chatham House Rule intimate interactive online sessions.

Some light reading…

Now here are some good articles to expand your mind (or increase your dread). In particular, I’d like to draw your attention to the Brandon Rohrer information on transformers as a great resource for anyone wanting to get their heads around this important area.

• Bethel, E. W., Amankwah, M. G., Balewski, J., Beeumen, R. V., Camps, D., Huang, D., & Perciano, T. (2023). Quantum Computing and Visualization: A Disruptive Technological Change Ahead. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 43(06), 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2023.3316932

• Boyd, E. (2024, February 26). Introducing Mistral-Large on Azure in partnership with Mistral AI. Microsoft Azure Blog. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral-ai-announce-new-partnership-to-accelerate-ai-innovation-and-introduce-mistral-large-first-on-azure/

• Cai, A., Arawjo, I., & Glassman, E. L. (2024). Antagonistic AI (arXiv:2402.07350). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.07350

• Davis, W. (2024, February 22). Microsoft and Intel strike a custom chip deal that could be worth billions. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079336/microsoft-intel-chip-partnership-foundry-tsmc

• Fang, R., Bindu, R., Gupta, A., Zhan, Q., & Kang, D. (2024). LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites (arXiv:2402.06664). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.06664

• Google Left in ‘Terrible Bind’ by Pulling AI Feature After Right-Wing Backlash. (2024, February 28). Bloomberg.Com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-28/google-left-in-terrible-bind-by-pulling-ai-feature-after-right-wing-backlash

• Gowran, L. M. (2024, February 19). Monumental raises $25m to bring builder bots to Europe. Silicon Republic. https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/monumental-funding-builder-robots-construction

• Introduction to AI assurance. (n.d.). Retrieved 13 February 2024, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-to-ai-assurance

• Knight, W. (n.d.). OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over. Wired. Retrieved 11 February 2024, from https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/

• Malekzadeh, M., & Kawsar, F. (2024). Salted Inference: Enhancing Privacy while Maintaining Efficiency of Split Inference in Mobile Computing. Proceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 14–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3638550.3641131

• Polewiak, K. (2023, November 6). The Protected Audience API Made Simple | Your Guide to Protected Audience API. RTB House Blog. https://blog.rtbhouse.com/your-guide-to-protected-audience-api/

• Rohrer, B. (n.d.). Transformers from Scratch. End-to-End Machine Learning. Retrieved 27 February 2024, from https://e2eml.school/transformers.html

• Tyson, M. (2024, February 19). Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen—Chinese and US researchers show new side channel can reproduce fingerprints to enable attacks. Tom’s Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/your-fingerprints-can-be-recreated-from-the-sounds-made-when-you-swipe-on-a-touchscreen-researchers-new-side-channel-attack-can-reproduce-partial-fingerprints-to-enable-attacks

• Vals.ai: LegalBench. (n.d.). Retrieved 21 February 2024, from https://www.vals.ai/

Recent podcast episodes

• Yarning about data visualisation: Quinn Dombrowski – S2.1

• Education, Data, and Generative AI: the future – Ray Fleming – Episode 17

• Substack and Nazis

• Data needs good management – Mark Nicholls – Episode 16

• Data in manufacturing – Adam Sharman – Episode 15