The Southern California Monte Jade (SCMJ) Science & Technology Association and Spokeo recently hosted the ”AI and Me Conference,” which brought together renowned experts in the fields of AI, Technology and Academic fields to share their knowledge and experiences. 

The conference catered to both seasoned professionals and those new to the field, providing a valuable opportunity to gain insights into the future of AI.  The sessions covered the latest advancements in AI technology and its impact on various industries, including healthcare, finance, and more. 

For those who weren’t able to join this great day filled with insightful talks, interactive workshops, and networking opportunities, we are sharing one of the presentation decks below.

“Life Cycle of Foundation Models – Pretrain, Finetune, and Prompt Generative AI in Research”
Cho-Jui Hsieh
Associate Professor of Computer Science
UCLA

Cho-Jui Hsieh is currently an associate professor of Computer Science at UCLA. He received his master’s degree at National Taiwan University under supervision of Prof. Chih-Jen Lin. Before joining UCLA, he have worked as an Assistant Professor at UC Davis Computer Science and Statistics for three years, and was a visiting scholar at Google since 291 

He is interested in developing new algorithms and optimization techniques for large-scale Machine Learning problems, and currently he is working on developing new machine learning models as well as improving the model size, training speed, prediction speed, and robustness of popular (deep learning) models.

Since 2018, Professor Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at Google.

“AI in Healthcare: Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Model”
Tsung-ting “Tim” Kuo
Assistant Professor of Medicine
UC San Diego Health
Department of Biomedical Informaticsj

Dr. Tsung-Ting Kuo is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in University of California San Diego (UCSD) Health Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). He earned his PhD from National Taiwan University (NTU) in the Institute of Networking and Multimedia. Prior to becoming a faculty member, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSD DBMI and received the UCSD Chancellor’s Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award. 

He has been a major contributor towards the UCSD DBMI team winning the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) healthcare blockchain challenge, and also the NTU team winning the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Cup competition four times. He was awarded a NIH R01 Research Project Grant, a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award with an Administrative Supplement, a R13 Support for Conferences and Scientific Meetings Grant, as well as UCSD Academic Senate Health Science Research Grants, for blockchain-based and predictive biomedical, healthcare and genomic studies. His research focuses on blockchain technologies, machine learning, and natural language processing.

“Towards 4th Generation of AI – Advancements and Challenges in Natural Language Processing“
Kai-Wei Chang
Associate Professor
UCLA
Department of Computer Science

Professor Kai-Wei Chang is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCLA. He has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.

Professor Chang has been awarded the 2019 Amazon Research Award for his research on Learning Robust Contextual Language Encoders at Scale. The Amazon Research Awards helps fund outstanding, innovative research proposals across machine learning, robotics, operations research, and more, while strengthening connections between Amazon research teams, academic researchers, and their affiliated institutions. The grant program provides $80,000 in cash and $20,000 in AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers.

To see more research by Professor Chang, please visit http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~kwchang/