Towards an AI to Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz

Can an AI win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ)? That is the question we seek to answer in the NSMQ AI project, an open-source project that is building AI to compete live in the NSMQ and win. The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. The NSMQ is an exciting live quiz competition with interesting technical challenges across speech-to-text, text-to-speech, question-answering, and human-computer interaction. In this ongoing work that began in January 2023, we give an overview of the project, describe each of the teams, progress made thus far, and the next steps toward our planned launch and debut of the AI in October for NSMQ 2023. An AI that conquers this grand challenge can have real-world impact on education such as enabling millions of students across Africa to have one-on-one learning support from this AI.Comment: 7 pages. Under review at Deep Learning Indaba and Black in AI Workshop @NeurIPS 202

An Alternative to Location Based Music Rehearsals

Musicians rehearse with various equipment and systems. These tools restrict rehearsals to specific locations and may hinder a musician’s ability to rehearse at their leisure. The goal of this project was to devise a solution that would allow musicians greater flexibility with regard to rehearsal locations. Based on our literature review, we concluded that a mobile application would best facilitate our objectives. We then constructed two focus groups of musicians in order to obtain feedback regarding our prototype designs, and gather perspectives on mobile applications for musical rehearsals in general

Wireless Device Key Generation

Security is an important concern in today’s society. While securing communications is difficult to accomplish, securing wireless communications is the most difficult due to its broadcast nature and the randomness of wireless channels. Current physical layer security approaches argue that channel randomness can be exploited to ensure secure communications. The wireless channel between communicating users can be used to generate secret keys known only to them. It would be nearly impossible for a user eavesdropping on their communications to generate this same key due to inherent differences in channel properties. This approach for wireless key generation is discussed, implemented, and tested using various scenarios to prove that the communication over the wireless medium is secure

Parrots, Go Away!

The purpose of this project was to find a permanent solution for controlling parrot infestations that damage corn crops at the San Francisco Agricultural High School in Paraguay. The school is unable to grow corn to feed its livestock because Nanday Parakeets consume or damage virtually the entire crop. Our team researched and developed a range of cost-effective, environmentally-friendly strategies to combat the parrots, and presented them to a representative of the school. This year, this school will be conducting two corn trials based on our recommendations: one using a helikite, another using grocery bag covers. If our solutions are successful and corn crops are saved from parrot infestations, the school should be able to provide livestock feed and could thus allocate additional funds to the students’ needs. If proven effective, our proposed solution could serve as a model for other small farmers in the region who could protect their corn crops as well

Hemodynamic-effects of Corwin (ici118,587), a New Cardioselective Beta-adenoceptor Partial Agonist

We investigated a CAG trinucleotide repeat expansion in the ATXN2 gene in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Two new case-control studies, a British dataset of 1474 ALS cases and 567 controls, and a Dutch dataset of 1328 ALS cases and 691 controls were analyzed. In addition, to increase power, we systematically searched PubMed for case-control studies published after 1 August 2010 that investigated the association between ATXN2 intermediate repeats and ALS. We conducted a meta-analysis of the new and existing studies for the relative risks of ATXN2 intermediate repeat alleles of between 24 and 34 CAG trinucleotide repeats and ALS. There was an overall increased risk of ALS for those carrying intermediate sized trinucleotide repeat alleles (odds ratio 3.06 [95% confidence interval 2.37–3.94]; p = 6 × 10−18), with an exponential relationship between repeat length and ALS risk for alleles of 29–32 repeats (R2 = 0.91, p = 0.0002). No relationship was seen for repeat length and age of onset or survival. In contrast to trinucleotide repeat diseases, intermediate ATXN2 trinucleotide repeat expansion in ALS does not predict age of onset but does predict disease risk