Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a soft shape display, a robot that can rapidly and precisely change its surface geometry to interact with objects and liquids, react to human touch, and display letters and numbers – all at the same time. The display demonstrates high performance applications and could appear in the future on the factory floor, in medical laboratories, or in your own home. Imagine an iPad that's more than just an iPad--with a surface that can morph and deform, allowing you to draw 3D designs, create haiku that jump out from the screen and even hold your partner's hand from an ocean away. In a new study published in Nature Communications, they've created a one-of-a-kind shape-shifting display that fits on a card table. The device is made from a 10-by-10 grid of soft robotic "muscles" that can sense outside pressure and pop up to create patterns.

Artificial muscles are a progressing technology that could one day enable robots to function like living organisms. Such muscles open up new possibilities for how robots can shape the world around us; from assistive wearable devices that can redefine our physical abilities at old age, to rescue robots that can navigate rubble in search of the missing. But just because artificial muscles can have a strong societal impact during use, doesn't mean they have to leave a strong environmental impact after use. The topic of sustainability in soft robotics has been brought into focus by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart (Germany), the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz (Austria), and the University of Colorado (CU Boulder), Boulder (USA). The scientists collaborated to design a fully biodegradable, high performance artificial muscle – based on gelatin, oil, and bioplastics.

Marketing data are complex and have dimensions that make analysis difficult. Large unstructured datasets are often too big to extract qualitative insights. Marketing datasets also often involve relational and connected and involve networks. This specialization tackles advanced advertising and marketing analytics through three advanced methods aimed at solving these problems: text classification, text topic modeling, and semantic network analysis. Each key area involves a deep dive into the leading computer science methods aimed at solving these methods using Python.

One of the most useful areas in machine learning is discovering hidden patterns from unlabeled data. Add the fundamentals of this in-demand skill to your Data Science toolkit. In this course, we will learn selected unsupervised learning methods for dimensionality reduction, clustering, and learning latent features. We will also focus on real-world applications such as recommender systems with hands-on examples of product recommendation algorithms. Prior coding or scripting knowledge is required.

This course can be taken for academic credit as part of CU Boulder's Master of Science in Data Science (MS-DS) degree offered on the Coursera platform. The MS-DS is an interdisciplinary degree that brings together faculty from CU Boulder's departments of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Science, and others. With performance-based admissions and no application process, the MS-DS is ideal for individuals with a broad range of undergraduate education and/or professional experience in computer science, information science, mathematics, and statistics. In this course, you'll be learning about Computer Vision as a field of study and research. First we'll be exploring several Computer Vision tasks and suggested approaches, from the classic Computer Vision perspective.

Deep Learning is the go-to technique for many applications, from natural language processing to biomedical. Deep learning can handle many different types of data such as images, texts, voice/sound, graphs and so on. This course will cover the basics of DL including how to build and train multilayer perceptron, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), autoencoders (AE) and generative adversarial networks (GANs). The course includes several hands-on projects, including cancer detection with CNNs, RNNs on disaster tweets, and generating dog images with GANs. Prior coding or scripting knowledge is required.

In this course, you'll be learning various supervised ML algorithms and prediction tasks applied to different data. You'll learn when to use which model and why, and how to improve the model performances. We will cover models such as linear and logistic regression, KNN, Decision trees and ensembling methods such as Random Forest and Boosting, kernel methods such as SVM. Prior coding or scripting knowledge is required. We will be utilizing Python extensively throughout the course.

In the Machine Learning specialization, we will cover Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning, and the basics of Deep Learning. You will apply ML algorithms to real-world data, learn when to use which model and why, and improve the performance of your models. Starting with supervised learning, we will cover linear and logistic regression, KNN, Decision trees, ensembling methods such as Random Forest and Boosting, and kernel methods such as SVM. Then we turn our attention to unsupervised methods, including dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., PCA), clustering, and recommender systems. We finish with an introduction to deep learning basics, including choosing model architectures, building/training neural networks with libraries like Keras, and hands-on examples of CNNs and RNNs.

CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher Rosy Southwell and undergraduate student Cooper Steputis demonstrate the use of a functional near-infrared spectroscopy device, which can monitor brain activity. Such laboratory studies will compliment efforts that a university research team is launching in Colorado classrooms. That's the vision of a new $20 million research collaboration that will be led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The project is called the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming. It will explore the role that artificial intelligence may play in the future of education and workforce development--especially in providing new learning opportunities for students from historically underrepresented populations in Colorado and beyond.

The advances in AI has enabled computers to assist doctors in detecting diseases and help keep a check on patient health remotely. Now, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) are working to leverage ML to psychiatry using a speech-based mobile app. Peter Foltz, a research professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science says – "We are not in any way trying to replace clinicians. But we do believe we can create tools that will allow them to better monitor their patients." Notably, he is also the co-author of a new paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin that illustrates the promise and potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence in psychiatry.