Background

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has incredible potential to improve modern life by addressing many of society's major challenges related to human health, economic stability, and food security. As a subset of AI, Machine Learning (ML), focuses on recognizing patterns in large and diverse data, and is one of the most promising avenues for generating important insights from data.

What is AI Campus?

AI Campus is a collaborative, project-based-learning initiative designed to equip participants with the confidence and skills needed to apply artificial intelligence (AI) methods in their career or research. It brings together participants of diverse backgrounds with top AI experts from around the country to address challenging scientific problems using AI and machine learning (ML).

This program consists of two, 4-month phases provided at no cost to students, staff, post-docs, faculty, and clinicians from diverse academic backgrounds.

• Phase 1: (No Prerequisites) Teams of participants and coaches form around available projects applying various AI and ML approaches to cutting-edge applications ranging from biomedical imaging, natural language processing, genomics, self-driving cars, etc. Learning is auto-tutorial, with guidance from educational resources, coaches, and team-mates. Phase 1 culminates in a 'showcase' where teams present their project progress and findings at a special seminar open to the Cedars-Sinai Community.
• Phase 2: (Optional) Engaged participants are selected to advance to participate in either a global AI competition such as the recent Electronic Health Records COVID-19 DREAM Challenge or a novel Cedars-based collaborative research project with the goal of publication.

National AI Campus

The AI Campus program was founded by Dr. Xiuzhen Huang at the Arkansas State University in 2018. Soon after, it was extended into a National AI Campus program through the 'Center for No-Boundary Thinking' and a number of federal funding initiatives, primarily targeting the training of high-school and undergraduate-level students.

The National AI Campus is also dedicated to providing a first experience in AI to people from diverse educational, ethnic, gender, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Collaborating states and institutions include Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) as well as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

You can find the original AI Campus webpage from Arkansas State University here. You can find the new National AI Campus webpage here.

AI Campus @ Cedars Sinai

Here at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center, we have adapted the National AI Campus program to the unique needs of this institution, i.e. a greater diversity of participant degree/training experience, and a greater emphasis on biomedically related projects.

We aim to hold Phase 1 of Cedars AI Campus annually in the winter/spring.

Cedars AI Campus is supported by the Department of Computational Biomedicine as well as the Center for AI Research and Education (CAIRE).

Director – Dr. Ryan Urbanowicz and Associate Director – Dr. Joshua Levy.

Who Can Participate?

Anyone working at Cedars Sinai or those invited from outside institutions can participate in the Cedars Sinai AI Campus program. This includes students, staff, post-docs, faculty, and clinicians from any academic background/specialty and any level of degree or experience. Individuals who have participated in previous years are welcome to do so again.

General Learning Objectives

• Use basic Python computer coding to apply established and cutting edge ML approaches to a target group problem/application
• Use Google Colab or Jupyter Notebooks as well as common Python packages such as pandas, numpy, and scikit-learn
• Prepare data for analysis
• Understand how ML algorithms work
• Evaluate, interpret, and communicate ML results
• Adapting existing ML methods to your own research problems
• Run algorithms with HPC resources
• Coding and research with an interdisciplinary team
• Identify new research collaborators

Volunteering as a Coach or Assistant Coach

Coaches and assistant coaches in the AI Campus program are volunteers with significant experience in programming, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We welcome new volunteer coaches and assistant coaches for upcoming years, either within an existing project or on a new project you may wish to propose.

Submitting a New Project

If you have a project you'd like to submit for consideration in the Cedars AI Campus program, first register on this website. Registration will need to be approved before you can Login.

Once logged in, under the 'Manage Projects' tab, select 'Submit Project'. In the new screen you will be prompted to provide the following information:

• Project Title
• An optional thumbnail image to capture the theme of your project
• Short Summary (2-3 sentences)
• Project Description (A longer formatted description providing details about the target problem, data, goals, and/or learning objectives, and a link to download publicly available data if you are not directly providing the data in the project upload - below)
• Recommended 'tags' to help people find your project based on relevant keywords
• A zipped folder upload - which should contain any files that participants would need to get started in working on the project, e.g., the data or datasets, relevant research papers, example code to load and start working with the data, a data dictionary, etc.

New Project Guidelines

The most important constraint for new Phase 1 projects, is that the data be publicly available and not include any personal health information (PHI).

We encourage projects focused on biomedically relevant applications of AI, however we welcome other topics as well.

If the target data for the project is very large (i.e. > 1 GB) and/or already available for download from a secondary web-link, please include this weblink in the project description instead of uploading the dataset as part of the zipped folder. If the dataset is small and/or not available for download at any other link, please include the data in the zipped folder.

Beyond AI Campus

For those who may be interested in extending their AI training to graduate studies, check out Cedar-Sinai’s PhD in Health Artificial Intelligence. This new degree program will begin accepting applications in the fall of 2024 and kick off in the fall of 2025.