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: (TBD at Cedars) 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 National AI Campus was founded by Dr. Xiuzhen Huang at the Arkansas State University in 2018, originally engaging 11 academic institutions across the state through the 'Center for No-Boundary Thinking'. It focused on AI training open to students, postdoc and faculty members from all disciplines. Today, as shown in the map, the National AI Campus network includes more than 81 partner institutions from 31 states.

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

The Cedars AI Campus Program

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.

Phase 1 of the Cedars AI Campus Program is held annually beginning in February and concluding at the end of June with a showcase of team project presentations. Announcements to register for Phase 1 are sent out in January. If you have not seen an announcement by mid-January please reach out and we will make sure you are sent the registration link. Please note that the Login/Register tab on this website is not for the joining the Cedars AI Campus program as a participant, but rather for organizers, and those interested in proposing new AI Campus projects.

The start of Phase 1 coincides with educational workshops on basic programming, machine learning, and data science, that are open to anyone in Cedars research community.

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

Who Can Participate?

Anyone working at Cedars Sinai or those directly 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. It is expected that all participants will have permission granted from their respective supervisor to engage in the program.

General Learning Objectives

Coaches and assistant coaches in the Cedars AI Campus program are volunteers with significant experience in programming, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are always on the lookout for members of our Cedars community that have relevant expertise in ML or AI, to reach out to use if they are interested in volunteering as a coach/assistant coach either for an existing project offering or for a newly proposed project. Engaged participants from previous years of the program are also welcome to inquire about volunteering as a coach or assistant coach in future years.

Volunteering as a Coach or Assistant Coach

Coaches and assistant coaches in the Cedars AI Campus program are volunteers with significant experience in programming, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are always on the lookout for members of our Cedars community that have relevant expertise in ML or AI, to reach out to use if they are interested in volunteering as a coach/assistant coach either for an existing project or for a newly proposed project. Engaged participants from previous years of the program are also welcome to inquire about volunteering as a coach or assistant coach in future years.

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.

PhD in Health Artificial Intelligence at Cedars Sinai

For those interested in extending their AI training to graduate studies, check out Cedar-Sinai’s PhD in Health Artificial Intelligence.