I'm happy to share that I've obtained a new certification: AWS Machine Learning Foundations from Udacity! One of the things I found interesting about this course is my recent exposure to and hands-on experience with generative AI. Generative AI gives the ability to create new 3d cad designs, and generate new data, algorithms, etc. from a pre-trained model. In the coming days, I will be exploring Generative AI in the design of robot components. Special appreciation to AWS amazon and Udacity for the privilege to participate in this program.

The 11th of October marks Ada Lovelace Day, a special moment in the annual tech calendar. It's an International Day of Recognition that celebrates women in STEM, named after the woman widely recognised as the world's first computer programmer. So immense was Ada Lovelace's contribution in a short life -- she died of illness in 1842 at age 36 -- that her notes provided inspiration for Alan Turing's work on the first modern computers in the 1940s. Ada Lovelace Day provides an opportunity to reflect. Our minds have travelled back not as far as the 1800s but to May this year when we hosted a panel at the Girls in Tech Australia Conference.

Power Automate, Microsoft's Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI's Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural language and have Codex generate suggestions to jumpstart the flow creation. It's Microsoft's latest move to more tightly integrate the various technologies from OpenAI, the San Francisco AI startup in which it has invested $1 billion, into its family of products. Two years ago, Microsoft introduced a Power Apps feature that used GPT-3, OpenAI's text-generating system, to create formulas in Power Fx, Power Platform's programming language.

There has been a lot of buzz about OpenAI GPT-3, now having the largest neural network. Does it mean the AI problem has been solved? Yes, it has a large dataset, but we still don't know how it learns. OpenAI Inc is a non-profit arm of Open.AI LP whose goal is to create a'friendly AI' that will benefit humanity. Open.AI has several different offerings: This is where we give between 10-100 contexts to a model and expect the model to determine what comes next.

When Azure OpenAI Service launched in 2021, the service -- a part of Azure Cognitive Services -- provided enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI's API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation and text autocompletion. But after expanding the service in May with fine-tuning features, Microsoft is today introducing invite-only access to DALL-E 2 for select Azure OpenAI Service customers. Customers can use DALL-E 2 to generate custom images using either text or images. In line with the consumer DALL-E 2 service, they can leverage inpainting and outpainting -- capabilities that generate new content within a portion of an image or push an image beyond its original confines, respectively -- in addition to a feature that generates variations on an existing image. Early adopters include brands like Mattel, which used DALL-E 2 to come up with ideas for a new Hot Wheels model car.

Microsoft said it will "soon" bring DALL-E 2-powered AI art to Windows with a new Microsoft Designer app and a separate, related Microsoft Image Creator toolset to Bing and Microsoft Edge. AI art is all the rage right now, with various tools such as Craiyon providing basic ways of creating AI art. Midjourney is a more advanced AI art service that provides a step up in functionality. Meanwhile, the godfather of AI art, DALL-E, is now free to try as well. What's interesting, though, is that OpenAI, the developers of DALL-E, have moved on to the more sophisticated DALL-E 2 algorithm, which is locked behind beta access right now.

New hardware isn't the only thing Microsoft had to share at its Surface event. On Wednesday, Chief Product Officer Panos Panay announced Microsoft Designer, a new graphic design offering within the company's 365 productivity suite. The app features DALL-E 2 integration, allowing you to use the well-known image generator to add supporting art to your social media posts, invitations and documents. In the future, Microsoft plans to bring DALL-E support to Bing and Edge "so you can use your words not just to search but to create." The announcement comes just two weeks after OpenAI removed the waiting list that had existed for DALL-E, making the tool more accessible.

Artificial intelligence will soon have a formidable presence in the arts. DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion have demonstrated their ability to generate complex and interesting visual images. There is already AI-generated music, and it will get better. There is even talk of dictating a story into a computer and the software generating a short digital movie. The question is whether or to what extent such art will catch on, given the diminished role of human creativity.

Scientists have long been developing machines that attempt to imitate the human brain. Just as humans are exposed to systemic injustices, machines learn human-like stereotypes and cultural norms from sociocultural data, acquiring biases and associations in the process. Our research shows that bias is not only reflected in the patterns of language, but also in the image datasets used to train computer vision models. As a result, widely used computer vision models such as iGPT and DALL-E 2 generate new explicit and implicit characterizations and stereotypes that perpetuate existing biases about social groups, which further shape human cognition. Such computer vision models are used in downstream applications for security, surveillance, job candidate assessment, border control, and information retrieval.

It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: They would train an AI on 14 years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album "Chain Tripping." "I'm not interested in being a reactionary," YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said in a documentary about the album. "I don't want to return to my roots and play acoustic guitar because I'm so freaked out about the coming robot apocalypse, but I also don't want to jump into the trenches and welcome our new robot overlords either." But our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation. Even though the Grammy-nominated "Chain Tripping" was released in 2019, the technology behind it is already becoming outdated.