Welcome to the twelfth and final computer lab for the Data Science stream of STM1001.
We hope you have enjoyed your time in STM1001, and that the topics covered in the Data Science stream have provided you with a taste of the variety of potential pathways one can take as a data scientist.
This computer lab will act mainly as a revision session. However, we will also take a brief look at the wonders of artificial intelligence.
Just as for previous topics such as data visualisation and machine learning, we could have easily spent an entire semester focusing on the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a complex and nuanced cutting-edge field of science, with many sub-fields. In general, work in AI focuses on creating systems, or ‘agents’ , that can perceive information in an environment and perform logical actions based on this information (see e.g. Russell (2016)).
A few examples of AI applications include the Google search engine and the Amazon virtual assistant Alexa. In the future, AI robots such as Sophia (who has already been granted Saudi Arabian citizenship) will probably become a ubiquitous part of human life1. In general though, the future integration and assimilation of AI into every-day activities will probably be less obvious than a physical robot (for better or worse).
Check out this National Geographic article if you would like to learn more about Sophia.
Developing AIs can involve using advanced statistical algorithms, and therefore is beyond the scope of this subject.
Recently, AI-generated art has become a top topic, with AI programs like midjourney, Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E making news headlines (e.g. the midjourney-created digital artwork Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial won the 2022 Colorado State Fair digital art competition, and AI art is being displayed in museums around the world, such as MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City).
There are now numerous AI programs for generating digital art. Whether we like it or not, AI-generated art is here to stay. We can now even turn static 2D images into 3D rendered scenes, by using AI to approximate how light behaves in reality.
You can read about this, and more, at Nvidia’s AI Playground, which features articles, artwork, discussions and demonstrations centered around AI-generated art.
If you would like to spend some of this lab revising material from previous weeks, the links below may be helpful.
Computer Lab 1B (Using RStudio)
Computer Lab 2B (Data Visualisation I - plotly interactive histograms and scatter plots )
Computer Lab 3B (Data Visualisation II - plotly interactive box plots and violin plots)
Computer Lab 4B (Data Visualisation III - plotly advanced features)
Computer Lab 5B (Simulations in R)
Computer Lab 6B (Writing R Functions)
Computer Lab 7B (Big Data I - Clustering)
Computer Lab 8B (Big Data II - \(p\)-value adjustments for multiple hypothesis testing)
Computer Lab 9B (Machine Learning I - Supervised Learning - Classification)
Computer Lab 10B (Machine Learning II - Supervised Learning - Classification)
Computer Lab 11B (Machine Learning III - Supervised Learning - Advanced Classification and Model Tuning)
Great job working through all the data science stream computer labs. We hope you’ve enjoyed your time learning in this subject.
Please note that there is no solution file for this lab. Make sure to check the LMS for announcements and details regarding assessments.
These notes have been prepared by Rupert Kuveke. The copyright for the material in these notes resides with the author named above, with the Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and with La Trobe University. Copyright in this work is vested in La Trobe University including all La Trobe University branding and naming. Unless otherwise stated, material within this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Non Derivatives License BY-NC-ND.
While AI advancements and research may pose ethical concerns, we hopefully won’t have any Terminator or Westworld scenarios to deal with any time soon. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. ↩︎