Researchers at the University of Alaska Anchorage are looking for community problems to solve using artificial intelligence.
Kenrick Mock, the dean of UAA’s College of Engineering, said researchers are casting a wide net.
"What we're doing is we're asking the community, 'What are what kind of problems do you have that potentially could be addressed with AI?'" he said. "We've kept it kind of broad on purpose."
It’s part of what the university calls the Alaska AI Solutions Consortium, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Right now, they’re asking businesses, community groups and anyone else interested to get together with a faculty member to develop a proposal for a project.
Mock said AI can be useful in solving a wide variety of problems — and especially ones that deal with large amounts of data.
"The more data that's available, then the more likely it is we could train some kind of model that could make some interesting inferences," Mock said. "But there are some cases also where you don't need to have a lot of data, and it's more kind of searching for solutions, and so I guess I'd say we just encourage folks to ask us if they have an inkling that AI might apply."
Mock said they’ve already had a lot of interest from social service groups. One of Mock’s colleagues, UAA professor Masoumeh Heidari, is working with AI to study the connections between depression and diabetes among Alaska Native elders.
"We actually came up with some clear patterns," she said.
For instance, data from the Centers for Disease Control show that people who reported poor mental health also reported checking their blood glucose less often, she said.
The idea, Heidari said, is to come up with personalized treatment plans that take into account specific factors that make life in Alaska different.
"Some of the challenges we have is our data is coming from the national level, so we are very interested to make it more locally relevant — to respect the culture, the community perspectives," she said. “We want to be able, with collaboration with community partners, to collect more data and insight domain expertise that can improve our models."
Mock said anyone interested in collaborating with the university’s AI researchers should reach out to his office or visit UAA’s website.
