Happy New Year from MATRIX!

On behalf of the AI crew at the MATRIX, I’d like to wish each of you a healthy, successful and prosperous 2021 ! During this season, we take time to reflect upon the good things we have…like our collaboration with y’all! Here’s a sneak peek of what’s happening on our end since our July launch.

Warm Regards ~ Dhireesha

New beginnings in new spaces

We’re almost settled in to our new home on the 5th floor of the North Paseo Building (# 5.126). Located across from CyManII and next to NSCC, this ~ 1,000 sq. ft. multipurpose flex space will help drive active engagement amongst our various stakeholders. Our facility includes a satellite workstation for hosting visiting scholars and collaborators, a dedicated meeting space, along with our AI DIY space for supporting active student learning initiatives. We look forward to hosting you in our new facility soon.

AI servers ready for install in MATRIX headquarters.
3 Lambda AI Blade servers preparing for deployment

Building the AI ecosystem

We’re working hard to establish the MATRIX ecosystem across the core institutions (UTSA, UT Health, SwRI, and TBRI). We’ve made significant progress towards achieving this vision in our first five months, including the following milestones.

  • Researchers from UTSA’s Nu.AI Lab, UT Health, and the South Texas VA received a $200K award to develop novel transfer learning techniques for the early detection of dementia from the San Antonio Medical Foundation. We are committed to developing similar transdisciplinary collaborations across institutions in the coming year.
  • The entire MATRIX team continues to advance research in basic and applied AI (AI for health, ML for cybersecurity, lifelong learning AI), resulting in several new funded activities.
  • We hosted researchers from UTSA, SwRI, Apple, Corteva, and Amazon as part of our fall seminar series (archives are available on our YouTube channel). We’ll continue our seminars this spring semester on Fridays at 11 AM CST. Details about our seminars and other upcoming events are available on our events page.
  • MATRIX received a gift from Xilinx for Project Lovelace: Advancing Women in AI & Computing Career Pathways. This supports our targeted efforts to expand career opportunities for underrepresented groups in AI. We look forward to accelerating our workforce development efforts in the coming year.
  • In addition, we’ve begun partnering with the City of San Antonio’s Innovation Team in the development of an online platform to expedite the deployment of AI-based solutions for addressing critical needs within our community. We look forward to updating you on this progress in the coming year.

Moving forward to 2021

2020 was an incredibly difficult year for each of us. Your tremendous support was critical in allowing us to launch our Consortium and initiate our start-up activities during this challenging time. I look forward to working together this coming year as we strive to address some of the grand challenges in AI.