AI Science and Technology Apprenticeship Residency (“AISTAR”) Program
Over the past five years, there has been an explosion of interest in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies across all aspects of society. The rapid rate of developments in the field has far outstripped the ability of the broader community to keep up. Scientific advances in AI are increasingly made by a small group of high-technology companies and universities, and information flow is inherently limited. As a result, AI technologies are often applied blindly to problems with mixed results and significant levels of frustration to practitioners.
NYU proposes to alleviate some of these issues by opening its doors to practitioners in the field through a new program, called AI Science and Technology Apprenticeship Residencies (“AISTAR”). NYU is at the forefront of the AI Revolution, having some of the top faculty in the world in AI, including such luminaries as Yann LeCun (one of the 3 awardees of the 2018 Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize” of Computer Science), Rob Fergus, Brenden Lake, Sam Bowman and Kyunghyun Cho, amongst others. The goal of AISTAR is to host practitioners and scientists in AI for extended visits at NYU to provide them opportunities to take the latest advances and best practices in AI back to their home institutions.
While at NYU, the visiting scientists will be attached to ongoing research activities and mentored by top faculty in the field. Each scientist will work on a four-to-six month research project, have a senior faculty mentor, and will also have open access to senior staff for resolving day-to-day research and computational issues. They will also be able to attend NYU seminars, reading groups and classes. Scientific outcomes from their projects will be openly disseminated in the forms of academic publication and open source software, hence allowing visiting scientists to bring them back unencumbered to the visitor’s host institution. Participants will be asked to help defray program costs; there will be multiple options to match organizational needs.
The program will be hosted jointly by the Center for Data Science and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Computer Science) at 60 5th Avenue in New York City. The program head is Professor Kyunghyun Cho, one of the original developers of attention-based modeling in machine translation and NLP. Because of the COVID-19 crisis, we are starting an online pilot program in 2021. If you would like more information and/or participate in the program, please contact us at ai-scientists-in-residence@nyu.edu for more details.
CDS-Courant Academic Research Services (CARS)
The CDS-Courant Academic Research Services (CARS), a mentorship program, in which employees from external companies are mentored by our faculty who advise them in executing a research project. The initiative launched during the fall 2021 semester with our first collaborator LG Electronics (Seoul, South Korea). The first iteration of projects with LG focused on learning new visual and NLP-based classification models with minimally labelled data. We’re excited to expand CARS this year – more information coming soon.
Check out “Building Community Relations: The LG Electronics and CDS Academic Research Services Initiative”, an interview from our blog with faculty members and CARS leadership Kyunghyun Cho and Michael Picheny.