MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2021

INTERSECTIONS OF CONNECTIVITY
This New Tech Service Company Is Ushering in a New Era of Hybrid Events

JUNO, which has key executives in Dallas and other cities across the country, wants to get ahead of the hybrid event trend by offering event planners "Intersections of Connectivity," a free ebook on how to organize something that connects virtual participants and an in-person audience.

VERIFIED DATA
This Goes on Your Permanent Record: GreenLight Credentials Uses Blockchain for a ‘Life Transcript’

CEO Manoj Kutty and his team connect students, educators, and businesses by making records secure and shareable. Greenlight Credentials' tech expands beyond grades to certifications, job experiences, and verified skills. 

UT Southwestern has taken notice of the North Texas company's tech and is partnering with GreenLight to launch software tools to identify depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses in primary care settings.

STEAM
Middle School Girls from Across Texas Participate in Capital One and UT Dallas’ Virtual Innovate(her) Conference

The joint event brings together young female students with the goal of inspiring them to pursue their interests in fields such as science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. This year, new activities also taught attendees how to identify credible news sources and prepare for future job interviews.

⓵ VIRTUAL FOOD HALL: Dallas’ top ghost kitchen has a new app that consolidates orders for multiple restaurants at Revolving Kitchen into a single order with one delivery fee. Launched in 2020, Founder Tyler Shin calls his operation the “Airbnb of commercial kitchen rentals,” according to CultureMap Dallas. Shin was featured in Dallas Innovates’ Future 50 in January and a winner in D CEO and Dallas Innovates’ 2021 Innovation Awards in the food and beverage category.

⓷ AE NEXT: Dallas-based technical professional services firm Jacobs has won a global architecture and engineering contract with the U.S. Air Force. The shared program ceiling is valued at $2 billion. The contract, which has an initial five-year base period, has an option to renew for an additional five years. The company has previously worked on “innovative installations” of the Future Concept and smart systems, as well as building more sustainable, cyber-secure and resilient solutions for the Air Force, said Jacobs' Tim Byers, who is a retired USAF Major General, in a news release.

"Without this, you can’t get human intelligence."

Kinjal Basu
Computer Science Doctoral Student
UT Dallas
...on humans having commonsense reasoning.

Over time, humans naturally learn how to fill in gaps in a conversation, make inferences, understand exceptions to rules, and recognize a speaker’s mood. But for robots, these skills are much more complicated. 

Amazon is challenging teams to teach AI how to do all of this and more through its fourth annual Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge with $500,000 on the line.

As Kinjal Basu, the leader of the competing UT Dallas team, puts it, "The question is: How can you make an AI friend who can have a discussion with you?”

Anyone in the U.S. can currently test out one of the competitors' socialbots (although they won't know which one they're trying out) by telling the AI, “Alexa, let’s chat."