A growing number of fire departments across the country are turning to artificial intelligence to help detect and respond to wildfires more quickly. A major breakthrough in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing is on the way, and it's coming from Georgia Tech. Backed by a 20 million investment from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the university is building a supercomputer named Nexus. It's expected go online in spring 2026. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy Report Get my best tech tips, urgent security alerts and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox.

House Republicans argue in a new congressional report that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding over the last decade has contributed to China's military technological advancements. Collaborations between U.S. and Chinese academics have led to research publications related to advanced research on topics like hypersonics, directed energy, nuclear and high energy physics, and artificial intelligence and autonomy. That information, Republicans argue, could be weaponized against the U.S. in the event of war with China. Some of the collaborative research they identified related to military applications like high-performance explosives, tracking of targets and drone operation networks. The House Select Committee on China Competition, together with the Education and Workforce Committee, found some 9,000 joint research publications that were funded either through the Department of Defense (DOD) or the Intelligence Community (IC) published by co-authors with ties to China's "defense and security apparatus," including entities that are on a Commerce Department blacklist.

Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students' interest in CS is intellectual--culture moves through computation these days--but it is also professional. Young people hope to access the wealth, power, and influence of the technology sector. That ambition has created both enormous administrative strain and a competition for prestige.

Chatter about artificial intelligence mostly falls into three basic categories: anxious uncertainty (will it take our jobs?); In this hazy, liminal, pre-disruption moment, there is little consensus as to whether generative AI is a tool or a threat, and few rules for using it properly. For students, this uncertainty feels especially profound. Bans on AI and claims that using it constitutes cheating are now giving way to concerns that AI use is inevitable and probably should be taught in school. Now, as a new college admissions season kicks into gear, many prospective applicants are wondering: can AI write my personal essay?

The moment that tennis fans have been waiting for is almost finally here, with the Wimbledon Championships set to kick off next week. This year's tournament will see the likes of Petra Kvitova, Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz take to the grass. But in the near future, they could face stiff competition from an unlikely new contender - a robot. Scientists from Georgia Tech have developed a new robot named ESTHER (Experimental Sport Tennis Wheelchair Robot), which can zip around the court and even return human shots. The team believes the bot could serve as a training partner for professional players in the future, removing the psychological pressure of training against another human.

Existing machine learning (ML) models used to detect online misinformation are less effective when matched against content created by ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs), according to new research from Georgia Tech. Current ML models designed for, and trained on, human-written content have significant performance discrepancies in detecting paired human-generated misinformation and misinformation generated by artificial intelligence (AI) systems, said Jiawei Zhou, a PhD student in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing. Zhou's paper detailing the findings has received a best paper honorable mention award at the 2023 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Advised by Associate Professor Munmun De Choudhury, Zhou's research demonstrates that LLMs can manipulate tone and linguistics to allow AI-generated misinformation to slip through the cracks. "We found the AI-generated misinformation carried more emotions and cognitive processing expressions than its human-created counterparts," Zhou said.

A detailed article on the Georgia Tech and Facebook partnership aimed at building diversity in the AI field appears in the January issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor. In the initial steps of a program of collaboration with U.S. universities "that serve significant populations of Black and Latino students," Facebook has partnered with Georgia Tech to develop, co-teach, and fund graduate-level online deep learning courses. The program will be expanded in 2021 to include additional institutions. The collaboration at Georgia Tech came about through discussions between Facebook and the university's Machine Learning Center and the School of Interactive Computing, says Zsolt Kira, PhD, associate director of the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech and an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. This is not the first collaboration between the two partners, says Paco Guzmán, research scientist manager at Facebook and a lecturer for Facebook's Co-teaching AI Program.

It's a situation familiar to anyone who's ever communicated with a voice assistant on a smart device. You pose a request: "Hey Voice Assistant, tell me a story about Georgia Tech." More often than not, you get a related response – "Georgia Tech is located in Atlanta, Georgia. Would you like me to provide you with directions?" – but one with slightly unnatural language and only limited information. Despite the enormous strides made in artificial intelligence to develop systems that can answer simple questions and requests, the kinds of natural conversational language humans have with each other when giving more complex directions or telling stories has thus far been out of reach.

In an effort to expand services in machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and data science, Accenture will hold a Tech Symposium on Feb. 25 at the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech (ML@GT.) During the three-day event, guests will be treated to a tour of ML@GT's new home in Coda Tech Square and talks from several of ML@GT's faculty including Sehoon Ha, Zsolt Kira, Yao Xie, George Lan, Srijan Kumar, and Polo Chau. Attendees will include Accenture employees and clients from General Electric, NCR, Bank of America, and The Hershey Company. "We are thrilled to host Accenture and their clients. Accenture is a leader in strategy, digital, technology, and operations, and many of their clients are renowned for how their products and services are shaping our world. Being able to connect them with the groundbreaking work that our students and faculty are doing is a great opportunity and we are looking forward to having them on campus," said Irfan Essa, director of ML@GT.