Artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to improve university education. This is demonstrated by the Learning Intelligent System (LIS) project, which has been developed by researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) with backing from the eLearning Innovation Center. The system was created by a transdisciplinary research team at the UOC and has already produced excellent results over the past year. It shows how an automatic system can be used to help students who are at risk of failing or dropping out to improve their academic performance. In 2021, a team from the UOC's Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications published a study in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE) on the ability of LIS to successfully identify students at risk of failing a course.

Energy costs are an increasingly important issue in real-world scheduling, for both economic and environmental reasons. This paper deals with a variant of the well-known job shop scheduling problem, where we consider a bi-objective optimization of both the weighted tardiness and the energy costs. To this end, we design a hybrid metaheuristic that combines a genetic algorithm with a novel local search method and a linear programming approach. We also propose an efficient procedure for improving the energy cost of a given schedule. In the experimental study we analyse our proposal and compare it with the state of the art and also with a constraint programming approach, obtaining competitive results.

A new study by Ducker Frontier revealed that Puerto Rico could create between 26 and 34 percent additional jobs with the successful implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public and private sectors. On Nov. 5, during the second annual Microsoft AI Tour held at the Sheraton Hotel and Casino in San Juan's Convention District, Pablo González, director of Ducker Frontier Latin America, discussed with THE WEEKLY JOURNAL the entity's most recent analysis of Puerto Rico's advancement in adopting AI and other emerging technologies. AI, as defined by Microsoft Caribbean General Manager Herbert Lewy, is an amplification of human ingenuity, "a tool that allows humans to achieve more and improve the things we normally do." The continuous progress of this booming technology has prompted a myriad of concerns and dystopian scenarios regarding automation, such as computers rendering humans obsolete at a plethora of jobs and services, thus amplifying economic disparity. "People think that if an algorithm can do 30 percent of our tasks they will get fired from their jobs. The study intends to demystify this perception and shed light on some issues… We also wanted to measure something that is almost never measured, which is the creation of new industries and, therefore, jobs that do not exist today to reach a net effect of how it will affect job availability in Puerto Rico," González explained.

Agriculture uses 70 percent of the water in the world, and this appears to be an upward trend regarding water needs. As the demand in other industry sectors is also increasing, and the effects of climate change exacerbate water shortages, water saving measures have become an unavoidable challenge for maintaining the sector and preserving life. Agronomy researcher Rafael González has developed a model to predict in advance the water that users will need each day. This tool came about from a drive to ally with water resource sustainability. The model applies artificial intelligence techniques including fuzzy logic, a system used to explain the behavior of decision making.

Agriculture uses 70% of the water in the world and this appears to be an upward trend regarding water needs. In this context in which the demand in other industry sectors is increasing as well and the effects of climate change influence ever-increasing water shortages, water saving measures have become an unavoidable challenge if we want to maintain the sector and preserve life. This is the challenge taken on by Agronomy Department researcher Rafael González when developing a model able to predict in advance the water that each water user will need each day. Therefore, this tool came about from a drive to ally with water resource sustainability. What is innovative about this model lies in the application of artificial intelligence techniques such as fuzzy logic, a system used to explain the behavior of decision making.

Agriculture uses 70% of the water in the world and this appears to be an upward trend regarding water needs. In this context in which the demand in other industry sectors is increasing as well and the effects of climate change influence ever-increasing water shortages, water saving measures have become an unavoidable challenge if we want to maintain the sector and preserve life. This is the challenge taken on by Agronomy Department researcher Rafael González when developing a model able to predict in advance the water that each water user will need each day. Therefore, this tool came about from a drive to ally with water resource sustainability. What is innovative about this model lies in the application of artificial intelligence techniques such as fuzzy logic, a system used to explain the behavior of decision making.

When the MIT Big Data Challenge asked, "What can you learn from data about 2.3 million taxi rides?" graduate students in professor Marta González's research lab had some answers. Based on their experience writing machine-learning algorithms that find meaningful patterns in very large data sets, and on their skill applying those patterns to understand how people use transportation in urban areas, the students were able to predict the number of taxi pickups that had occurred in 700 time intervals at 36 locations in the Boston area. Their predictions were the best in the competition, earning them the number one spot and $4,000 in prize money. The scientific visualization of the data prepared by one team member garnered a second-place prize and an additional $1,000. The awards were announced mid-March.

The race to "cure death" has gripped Silicon Valley. In 2012, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, the'futurist' inventor best known for popularizing the idea of the "technological singularity," a hypothetical'super-intelligence' that will one day vastly outstrip the capacities of human beings. As Google's Director of Engineering, Kurzweil's job is to turn the fantasies of science fiction into consumer products -- and Google has invested billions in hopes that Kurzweil's dreams could one day become reality. One notable project, called "Calico," was announced the year after Kurzweil joined Google: a secretive biotech firm researching age-related diseases and developing anti-aging technology. Soon, Kurzweil promises, age and disease will disappear altogether, giving way to "software-based humans" with holographically projected bodies.