AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin is the No. 1 school for veterans in Texas, according to US News & World Report, a reflection of the university’s continued commitment to serving student veterans and military families. Through inventive academic programming and support initiatives, the university has continued to strive to holistically meet the unique needs of service members, veterans and their families.

During the past year, new programs to support professional and continuing education, transitioning to civilian life, and strengthening family resilience were added to the university’s full roster of specialized services for military-affiliated communities.

For example, with 500 military veterans and nearly 1,300 students who are spouses or children of current or former military members, the Veteran and Military Affiliated Services in the Office of the Dean of Students provides a variety of services including academic support, career services, health care and wellness resources.

The university also offers a suite of career-focused education and training opportunities for service members who are seeking to build on their transferable skills and prepare for employment in stable careers. As part of the Extended Education Ventures portfolio, The University of Texas at Austin Oscar Mike (UTOM) is an all-encompassing program, combining educational and career services with emotional and social support programs.

“Military personnel, their spouses and young adult children are uniquely qualified to become ideal employees for major Central Texas employers, such as Tesla, Indeed, Google, Apple or Dell,” said Liliya Spinazzola, senior director of extended campus custom training. “Highly trained, qualified and committed new employees from the program will also benefit the industry with a steady stream of applicants.”

The university is also developing another avenue for mental health support of military families. Researchers at UT Austin’s Institute for Military and Veteran Family Wellness recently received Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program funding to pilot an active-duty spousal resiliency program. The funding will support the adaptation and testing of a curriculum-based peer support group at Fort Hood, halfway between Austin and Waco, called the Military Spouse Resiliency Group. The program will train military spouses as peer leaders who facilitate supportive discussions and will help address specific life issues.

The US News & World Report 2022-2023 Best Colleges for Veterans rankings are published to provide data on top-ranked schools that make pursuing a college education more affordable for veterans and active-duty service members. UT Austin was also ranked No. 1 in 2021.

To learn more about the veteran community and UT Austin’s collaboration with the US military, visit utexas.edu/military.

LAWRENCE — Computer science students at the University of Kansas will test their skills throughout the remainder of the semester with a series of races using self-driving model cars developed by Amazon Web Services.

The students in Andrew Williams’ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class have spent the semester programming their cars and virtually testing the results using AWS’ DeepRacer, a cloud-based 3D racing simulator. For the races ongoing throughout the remainder of the spring semester, though, students have built a real track in the atrium of the School of Engineering’s LEEP2 building and are testing their AI programs using 1/18th-scale race cars.

“It’s a method for us to teach deep reinforcement learning — an artificial intelligence technique that allows cars to learn to drive by themselves, using their video cameras and other sensors they have,” said Williams, the KU Engineering associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and the Charles E. and Mary Jane Spahr Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“It’s going to be pretty exciting,” said Amanda Nelson, a junior in computer science from La Cygne.

In artificial intelligence, “reinforcement learning” uses reward functions — essentially, points for achieving a task — to help a machine to learn. In the case of the DeepRacer cars, students deploy the code, then the car receives points for staying on the track or for completing a lap quickly. The car responds to those points and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

“I’ve seen my car drive off the track a thousand times at this point,” Nelson said. “But as the car learns, it will get better and better.”

There will be two tiers for the KU DeepRacer competition. The first event, held April 14, pitted four-person student teams against each other. Later in the semester, the students will compete individually in a series of socially distanced races, with a champion to be crowned during the final class of the semester.

KU students aren’t just racing against each other. Using the 3D simulator, programmers from around the world compete in AWS’ monthly DeepRacer time trials. The top 10% of finishers in those races can advance to the company’s “Pro Division,” where qualifiers have an opportunity to compete for the AWS DeepRacer League Championship Cup, a live event that will be held in Las Vegas in December.

“Every single person on my team has qualified for the pro division,” Nelson said.

Williams said the DeepRacer program is giving students hands-on experience they can use when they enter the job market.

“It’s interesting, different and fun, so I think they’re more engaged,” he said. “The other thing I look at — you have companies like Tesla, Google and Amazon working on cars and trucks that can drive by themselves. This is real practical experience they can put on their resumes.”

Photo: Amanda Nelson, a junior in computer science.

ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that can simulate human conversation and write code, will metamorphose application development — and the developer profession — into a different animal, according to industry experts.

More than 1 million users have signed up for ChatGPT’s free research preview since OpenAI released the chatbot on Nov. 30. The bot can write simple webpages and applications in programming languages ​​such as JavaScript, Python and React. It can also find bugs in code and help create new programming languages.

The model interacts in a conversational way and can admit its mistakes, answer follow-up questions, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests, according to OpenAI.

While it cannot yet write complex code, such as what’s required for banking applications, ChatGPT will become a professional coder within the next decade, said Rob Zazueta, a freelance technical consultant in Concord, Calif.

The last iteration of GPT was surprisingly good, but this seems to leave it in the dust. It doesn’t take much imagination at this point to see where this is all going.

“I have a weird mix of existential dread about it… but also a ton of excitement,” he said. “The last iteration of GPT was surprisingly good, but this seems to leave it in the dust. It doesn’t take much imagination at this point to see where this is all going.”

Charlotte Dunlap, an analyst at British market research firm GlobalData, echoed Zazueta’s predictions, but believes the effects will happen much sooner.

“Consider how we’ve gone almost overnight from GitHub’s Copilot autocomplete prompting method of AI-injected coding to a dialogue format via ChatGPT,” he said. “Advancements are happening such that we’ll get there in two to three years.”

But no one knows what form those advancements will take, said Abhishek Gupta, founder and principal researcher at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. Twelve months ago, no one could have accurately predicted the ubiquity of generative AI systems and the many forms that it is taking today, he said. Similarly, it’s impossible to predict what will happen in three to 10 years.

“Nobody has a crystal ball,” Gupta said. “Trying to make a forecast that’s more than 18 months ahead in time — you might as well just flip a coin.”

Software engineering jobs of the future

One thing that’s in the cards: Developers will no longer have to write boilerplate code, Gupta said. Instead, they can focus on areas such as complex application architecture or cybersecurity.

Zazueta agreed, saying ChatGPT already does a good job at writing working code.

“I can take that, modify it to fit my needs and cut through boilerplate stuff quickly, allowing me to focus on the more intensive kind of work that AI is not yet ready to handle,” he said.

While ChatGPT might replace some aspects of coding, such as writing generic functions or boilerplate code, it won’t support programmers altogether, Zazueta said. That’s because a programmer’s job requires more than coding.

“It takes skill to be a programmer — to be able to structure a program, follow the logic and produce something greater than the sum of its parts,” Zazueta said.

Still, ChatGPT could pave the way for new job titles. Prompt engineering, for example, will become an in-demand skill set in the AI ​​era, he said.

Prompt engineers understand the principles and techniques for writing model inputs to get the best possible results from chatbots. As such, it should be called dark artistry, Gupta said.

“You have to have the right incantation in place that triggers what you want from it,” he said.

The rise of AI coders such as ChatGPT will also lead to an increased demand for software developers versed in data science principles, GlobalData’s Dunlap said. For example, engineers who can design, build and test applications using data science platforms and languages ​​such as Go and Python.

For would-be quantum programmers scratching their heads over how to jump into the game as quantum computers proliferate and become publicly accessible, a new beginner’s guide provides a thorough introduction to quantum algorithms and their implementation on existing hardware.

“Writing quantum algorithms is radically different from writing classical computing programs and requires some understanding of quantum principles and the mathematics behind them,” said Andrey Y. Lokhov, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the recently published guide in ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing. “Our guide helps quantum programmers get started in the field, which is bound to grow as more and more quantum computers with more and more qubits become commonplace.”

In succinct, stand-alone sections, the guide surveys 20 quantum algorithms—including famous, foundational quantum algorithms, such as Grover’s Algorithm for database searching and much more, and Shor’s Algorithm for factoring integers. Making the real-world connection, the guide then walks programmers through implementing the algorithms on IBM’s publicly available 5-qubit IBMQX4 quantum computer and others. In each case, the authors discuss the results of the implementation and explain differences between the simulator and the actual hardware runs.

“This article was the result of a rapid-response effort by the Information Science and Technology Institute at Los Alamos, where about 20 Lab staff members self-selected to learn about and implement a standard quantum algorithm on the IBM Q quantum system,” said Stephan Eidenbenz, a senior quantum computing scientist at Los Alamos, a coauthor of the article and director of ISTI when work on it began.

The goal was to prepare the Los Alamos workforce for the quantum era by guiding those staff members with little or no quantum computing experience all the way through implementation of a quantum algorithm on a real-life quantum computer, Eidenbenz said.

These staff members, in addition to a few students and well-established quantum experts, make up the long author list of this “crowd-sourced” overview article that has already been heavily cited, Eidenbenz said.

The first section of the guide covers the basics of quantum computer programming, explaining qubits and qubit systems, fundamental quantum concepts of superposition and entanglement and quantum measurements before tackling the deeper material of unitary transformations and gates, quantum circuits and quantum algorithms.

The section on the IBM quantum computer covers the set of gates available for algorithms, the actual physical gates implemented, how the qubits are connected and the sources of noise, or errors.

Another section looks at the various types of quantum algorithms. From there, the guide dives into the 20 selected algorithms, with a problem definition, description and steps for implementing each one on the IBM or, in a few cases, other computers.

Extensive references at the end of the guide will help interested readers go deeper in their explorations of quantum algorithms.

Papers: “Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners,” by Abhijith J., Adetokunbo Adedoyin, John Ambrosiano, Petr Anisimov, William Casper, Gopinath Chennupati, Carleton Coffrin, Hristo Djidjev, David Gunter, Satish Karra, Nathan Lemons, Shizeng Lin, Alexander Malyzhenkov, David Mascarenas, Susan Mniszewski, Balu Nadiga, Daniel O’Malley, Diane Oyen, Scott Pakin, Lakshman Prasad, Randy Roberts, Phillip Romero, Nandakishore Santhi, Nikolai Sinitsyn, Pieter J. Swart, James G. Wendelberger, Boram Yoon, Richard Zamora, Wei Zhu, Stephan Eidenbenz, Andreas Bärtschi, Patrick J. Coles, Marc Vuffray, and Andrey Y. Lokhov, in ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing. Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517340.

Funding: Information Science and Technology Institute at Los Alamos National Laboratory through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

LA-UR-22-25067

NEW YORK (AP) — In May 2018, the nation’s top Republicans needed help. So they called on the founder of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch.

President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were trying to stop West Virginia Republicans from nominating Don Blankenship, who had been convicted of violating mine safety standards during a lethal accident in one of his coal mines, to challenge the state’s incumbent senator, Democrat Joe Manchin.

“Both Trump and McConnell are appealing for help to beat unelectable former mine owner who served time,” Murdoch wrote to executives at Fox News, according to court records released this week. “Anything during the day helps, but Sean (Hannity) and Laura (Ingraham) dumping on him hard might save the day.”

Murdoch’s prodding, revealed in court documents that were part of a defamation lawsuit by a voting systems company, is one example showing how Fox became actively involved in politics instead of simply reporting or offering opinions about it. The revelations pose a challenge to the credibility of the most watched cable news network in the US at the outset of a new election season in which Trump is again a leading player, having declared his third run for the White House.

Blankenship, who ended up losing the primary, said in an interview Wednesday that he felt the change right away, with the network’s coverage taking a harsher turn in the final hours before the primary.

“They were very smart about elections — they did their dumping the day before the election, so I had no time to react,” said Blankenship, who filed a separate, unsuccessful libel suit against Fox.

On Wednesday, the network characterized Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit as a flagrant attack on the First Amendment and said the company had taken statements out of context. According to Fox, that included an acknowledgment by Murdoch that he shared with Jared Kushner, the head of Trump’s reelection campaign and the president’s son-in-law, an ad for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign that was to air on his network. Fox said the ad Murdoch forwarded to Kushner was already publicly available on YouTube and at least one television station.

“Dominion has been caught red handed again using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Fox said in a statement.

Fox has long been seen as a power in GOP politics with its large conservative fan base. But thousands of pages of documents released this week in the libel suit filed by Dominion shows how the network blurred the line between journalism and party politics. Dominion suede after it became the target of 2020 election conspiracy theories, often promoted on Fox’s airwaves.

Murdoch also told executives at Fox News to promote the benefits of Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation and give extra attention to Republican Senate hopefuls, the documents show. He wanted the network “banging on” Biden’s low-profile presidential campaign during the height of the pandemic in 2020.

Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University history professor and author of the book “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” said revelations in the lawsuit puncture Fox’s long argument that there is a dividing line between its news and opinion sides.

“The real revelation here is how much of a fiction that division is,” Hemmer said. “Some who know Fox have argued that for a while, but now we have real evidence.”

Hemmer cited text disclosed in the court documents from early November 2020 sent by Fox’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, urging the network’s leaders to retract its correct election night call that President Joe Biden won messages Arizona. Baier advocated for putting Arizona “back in his column,” referring to Trump.

In the days after the election, as Trump was making increasingly wild accusations that fraud cost him the White House, Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan Murdoch, who is executive chairman of the Fox Corp., texted with Fox News chief executive officer Suzanne Scott in alarm about a Trump rally.

“News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally,” Lachlan Murdoch wrote, according to the legal documents. “So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. The narrative should be this huge celebration of the president. Etc.”

Some of Fox’s politicking — like star host Sean Hannity’s frequent conversations with Trump during his presidency — is well known. But court papers show how Rupert Murdoch, the boss, inserted himself in the action, too.

Murdoch emailed Scott in November 2017 and urged him to promote Trump’s tax cut proposal, which had passed the House and was nearing a Senate vote.

“Once they pass this bill we have to tell our viewers again and again what they will get,” Murdoch wrote in the email, included in the court records. “Terrific, I understand, for all under $150k.”

After the first presidential debate in 2020, a “horrified” Murdoch told Kushner that Trump should be more restrained in the next debate. (Trump canceled that event.)

“That was advice from a friend to a friend,” Murdoch said in his deposition. “It wasn’t advice from Fox Corporation or in my capacity at Fox.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Dominion’s attorney, Justin A. Nelson.

“You’ve been — keep asking me questions as head of Fox,” Murdoch said. “It’s a different role being a friend.”

Murdoch’s email banter with Kushner led to the exchange of the Biden ad, according to court records. That exchange is now the subject of a complaint from the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America to the Federal Elections Commission, arguing Fox made an illegal contribution to the Trump campaign by giving it information about Biden’s advertisements. Fox said the sharing of public information can’t be considered a contribution.

Court records show that on Sept. 25, 2020, Murdoch emailed Kushner that “my people tell me” that Biden’s ads “are a lot better creative than yours. Just pass it on.”

The same month, Murdoch wondered in an email to Col Allan, the former editor of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, “how can anyone vote for Biden?” Allen responded that Biden’s “only hope is to stay in his basement and not face serious questions.”

“Just made sure Fox is banging on about these issues,” Murdoch responded, according to court records. “If the audience speaks the theme will spread.”

Another prominent politician Murdoch describes as a “friend” is McConnell, whose wife, Elaine Chao, then Trump’s transportation secretary, had served on the Fox board. Murdoch said he would speak to the Republican Senate leader “three or four times a year.”

In a special 2017 Republican Senate primary in Alabama, Murdoch said in his deposition, he told his top executives that he, like McConnell, opposed Roy Moore, a controversial former Alabama chief justice. Moore ultimately won the party’s nomination but lost the general election after he was credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including pursuing relationships with teenagers when he was in his 30s. Moore denied the allegations.

Murdoch, in the deposition, also cited his personal friendship with an unnamed Senate candidate in his suggestion to Scott that the network give extra attention to Republicans in close Senate races.

Days before the 2020 election, after Fox business anchor Lou Dobbs was critical of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R.S.C., Murdoch asked Scott to have Hannity pump up Graham, who was facing an extremely well-funded challenge from Democrat Jamie Harrison.

“You probably know about the Lou Dobbs outburst against Lindsay Graham,” Murdoch wrote on Oct. 27, misspelling the senator’s first name in the copy of the message in the court documents. “Could Sean say something supportive? We can’t lose the Senate if at all possible.”

Scott replied that Graham was on Hannity’s show the previous night “and he got a lot of time.” She added, “I addressed the Dobbs outburst.”

___

This story has been updated to correct the name of Dominion’s attorney, Justin A. Nelson.

___

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta, Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, Gary Fields in Washington and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.

By Bryan Hay

A Lafayette College computer science team, competing in the largest programming competition participated by all major universities and colleges in the world, performed with distinction and exceeded expectations.

(LR) Prof. Frank Xia, team advisor, Eliso Morazara ’25, Peter Li ’23, and Lekso Borashvili ’23

Each year, more than 2,500 teams from North America compete in regional and divisional programming contests. Among them, approximately 50 top teams are invited to the North America Championship to compete for the advancement to the World Finals.

For the first time in the College’s history, a Lafayette team earned a place in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) North America Championship and North America Programming Camp (NAC-NAPC), held May 26-31 at the University of Central Florida.

Team Lafayette 1 participated in a wide range of activities, learning problem-solving techniques in training sessions, honing skills in practice competitions, and exploring future opportunities at career fairs.

Members of Team Lafayette 1 are Lekso Borashvili ’23, Peter Li ’23and Claire Liu ’23. Due to a scheduling conflict, Liu was substituted by Eliso Morazara ’25 at the event. Lafayette College was one of three liberal arts colleges invited to the NAC along with Swarthmore College and Carleton College.

The team participated in a programming competition organized by the National Security Agency (NSA), in which they tried to solve real-world problems in cybersecurity and cryptography. Team Lafayette 1 ranked 25th among 50 teams in the NSA Challenge Competition.

During the five-hour final programming competition at the ICPC North America Championship (NAC), which took place May 30, teams attempted to solve most problems within the shortest possible time. Among 50 teams, the Lafayette team ranked 29th with four problems solved.

(LR): Peter Li ’23, Eliso Morazara ’25, and Lekso Borashvili ’23

“Considering the level of competition, this achievement was above my expectations,” says Frank Xia, associate professor of computer science and team adviser. “Despite their relative inexperience, the members of the Lafayette team ranked higher than teams from such strong institutions as UC Berkeley and Cornell.”

More importantly, the competition was a transformative experience for the students, he says.

“They had the opportunities to learn from the coaches and students in top institutions,” Xia notes. “They tested their skills in the highest-level competition and gained confidence in themselves. It strongly motivates them to strive for better results in the future.”

The competition encouraged Xia to build on the strengths of Lafayette’s computer science department and improve competitive programming at Lafayette.

“In the short term, I plan to attract more interest in competitive programming from a wider audience,” he added. “This will include activities such as expanding our training program, creating a competitive programming club, and holding regular practice competitions.”

In the long term, Xia said he would like to build an infrastructure for recruiting and training students.

“Many of the successful institutions have courses on competitive programming, either as electives or special topics courses,” he says. “Creating such a course will not only provide regular training for our competition team members, but it will also improve other students’ knowledge and skill levels in data structures and algorithms.”

Learn more and read the final results from NAC.

“We did not move through with our original plan of the hourly anchored news programs because we saw where we needed to put our focus and our focus was being nimble to stand up live breaking news at any point of the day,” said Justin Dial, senior executive producer at ABC News Live.

To be clear, ABC News Live has not entirely shelved its original programming plans. It continues to produce nightly prime-time shows anchored by ABC News correspondent Linsey Davis, and in July, it premiered a morning show “ABC News Live Update” hosted by ABC News anchor Diane Macedo. But those shows are designed to be able to adapt and pivot to breaking news coverage, such as when local officials host press conferences regarding coronavirus cases in their states and cities.

“As the summer went on and we were talking about social justice and civil unrest, we knew that we had to have the ability to stand up whether it was live breaking news specials during the day or whether it was last-minute taped specials that we have to put out in the evenings in prime time to put in context what happened that day,” Dial said.

Additionally, ABC News Live has produced shows specifically around the big news that has broken this year. In March, ABC News Live produced “Pandemic: What You Need to Know,” which aired on the streamer as well as ABC’s linear networks and in September became the third hour of “Good Morning America” and was retitled “GMA3: What You Need to Know.”

For traditional news broadcasters like ABC News, having a 24/7 streaming service can be invaluable in a year when even a 24/7 stream seems insufficient to squeeze in all the major stories — or to satisfy news-hungry viewers.

Streaming news viewership has increased throughout 2020, and that growth accelerated leading up to, and following, the US presidential election. In the 90-day period ending Nov. 18, the amount of time people spent streaming news programming increased by 133% compared to the previous 30 days, according to video analytics firm Conviva. Expanding that purview to the 90-day period ending Nov. 18, streaming news watch time was 81% higher than in the previous 90-day period.

“What our research has shown in general is that prime time, especially during Covid, starts at 10 am,” said Conviva CEO Bill Demas.

ABC News Live’s monthly unique viewership reached 31 million people in October, up from 7 million in February, according to an ABC News spokesperson. On average, ABC News Live has added three million new viewers each month between February and October. Much of the streamer’s viewership growth is owed to the election. On Election Day alone, ABC News Live received 20.9 million unique viewers, and that figure rose to 35.8 million unique viewers on the day after the election.

While the amount of time people spend watching ABC News Live per session has “increased a little bit,” the streamer is seeing that the amount of time people are spending watching over the course of the month has also grown, said Kaizar Campwala, vp of business operations and insights at ABC News. An ABC News spokesperson declined to say how much time, on average, viewers spend watching ABC News Live each month, but said that watch time has nearly tripled for its connected TV apps between February and October. “They’re watching more ABC News Live repeatedly,” Campwala said.

Post-election and heading into 2021, the programming strategy for ABC News Live will build on the adaptable nature of its line-up in 2020. That strategy will be primarily oriented around 24/7 breaking news coverage and analysis, but not be limited to that programming.

“We know that what we need to position ourselves in 2021 as well are these hourlong in-depth specials that we created throughout 2020. We did several around the election. We already have some in mind that we’re thinking about that we’re going to be ready to roll out around the inauguration, [the first 100 days of President-Elect Joe Biden’s term] and beyond,” Dial said.