Hey there!

Sorry about the long newsletter, but there’s so much to talk about…

A couple of weeks ago we hosted our fourth annual Life Summit at BioscienceLA to discuss AI’s impact on healthcare. This was the first time we hosted the summit in-person since its inception on the Caltech campus in 2019 and we couldn’t be more proud of what we have accomplished over the last four years. Our hybrid program now reaches over 13 countries and our participants range from startups to big-tech, hospital systems, R1 research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, investors, and local government officials.

You can now watch sessions from Life Summit 2022 on our Youtube channel. 

During the Life Summit, teams competing in our Fall Open Innovation Challenges with RTI International and the All of Us Research Program presented their solutions to a panel of judges. Our first-place winning teams Trojan.AI and DecidED each took home $5,000. Runner-up, team MYST for Challenge #1 received $1,000.

Challenge #1: Predicting and mapping the prevalence of Diabetes and Asthma based on census tract level data for the state of California. 

Challenge #2: An interactive dashboard for LatinX participants in the All of Us Research Program to determine if their Diabetes worsens based on comorbid risk factors. 

Darkness Behind the Light: A Love Letter to LA

If you were one of the 600 attendees at our Fun For Funds Festival (FFFF) during LA Tech Week, you experienced one of the most ambitious collaborative projects AI LA has ever pulled off!

Darkness Behind the Light (DBTL): A Love Letter to LA is an exploration of the LA we live in, and the future that we dream about. Using data drawn from across LA’s five supervisory districts as the paint, Ouchhh Studios used algorithms as the brush to design abstract art that reflects the challenges of each district and the promise of AI innovation in shaping a better future.

Light at the End of the Funnel

After our successful FFFF, we knew DBTL had to live on in other form factors, so AI LA Community member, James Macion continued to work with the datasets to develop five dashboards in Tableau. The five dashboards show correlations in the sectors of transportation, air quality, housing, mental health, and physical health.

Below you can interact with the data, tweaking variables and watching the results play out before you in easy-to-understand visualizations. The installation is titled Light at the End of the Funnel, expressing that the proper interplay of parameters can make data accessible, understandable, and most importantly, actionable. 

District 1 Accessibility- “ The Places We Go" explores accessibility predominantly to the things people need for a quality life: quality food, good jobs and retail stores. District 1 covers East LA and Downtown and this tableau examines transportation, income levels, and location of resources to determine accessibility.District 2 Environment- “The Air We Breathe” explores air quality in MidCity, Inglewood and El Segundo, areas that are notoriously affected by their proximity to LAX. Citizens of these areas report higher levels of respiratory illness from pollution from engine emissions and airplane-specific toxins.District 3 Housing- “The Homes We Inhabit” looks at homelessness throughout all of LA County. It compares data on income, rent severity, crowding, single parent homes and general neighborhood health.District 4 Racial Equity- “The Skin We Live In" looks at racial equity in Long Beach and the ports of Los Angeles. This tableau looks at factors such as education, physical health, income level and mental health factors that disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic communities. District 5 Health Access- “The Bodies We Care For” examines relationships between factors affecting bodily health and access to healthcare. District 5 covers all of Los Angeles County and the data reveals insights into which communities are most affected by things like heat waves and other challenges associated with climate change. 

The idea behind this project is not just to do party tricks with AI. It’s to use the resources made available to us through open data to make the world a more equitable, more democratized, and more beautiful place. That requires civic engagement, and civic engagement requires equal and easy access to information.

How do we best display that information so that it’s comprehensible, engaging and actionable? How do we make these tools available to all people and not just those of us who are privileged with access to technology and experience in how to navigate it? We don’t know! This project’s mission is to find out. Please help us by exploring the five dashboards and providing us with constructive feedback.

Please fill out this form if you are interested in volunteering at AI LA.

Interested in joining a collective of artists and technologists?

There is a tremendous amount of activity happening in the generative AI application landscape, as you can see with the map below created by Sequoia’s Sonya Huang. Multiple members of AI LA have expressed interest in developing a collective of artists and technologists who would like to co-work/co-live together while developing best practices using AI to create content, from idea to distribution, while exploring the future of storytelling.

Please fill out this form if this sounds like something you'd participate in. 

#LongLA Holiday Party 12/15/22

The #LongLA Holiday Party was created in 2021 by AI LA, BioscienceLA, Rob Ryan, and a syndicate of 30+ LA-based organizations to celebrate the holidays and give back to our local community. 

Last year we had over 300 attendees that donated over 703 pounds of food to the LA Regional Food Bank, donated enough toys for 100 children at Children’s Hospital LA, and we received donations of toddler clothes for Rent-a-Romper. 

This annual event is intended to be an inclusive holiday party, one in which each sponsoring organization can take pride and ownership without going through the hassle of producing the event themselves.

We will be making an official announcement on 11/17. Please get in touch with Todd if you’d like to get involved.

2022 EQUITY CROWDFUNDING WEEK

On November 9 - 11, the 2022 Equity Crowdfunding Week will bring the biggest startup exhibition Los Angeles has ever seen. From Boxabl houses to 1000 miles-per-charge EVs, web3 companies to robotics, food and beverage to cannabis this conference will have it all. Meet the heads of industries, from the CFO of Weedmaps to the Dapper Labs team and even the founder of Cryptokitties. It’s 3 days of events, exhibitions, parties, workshops and off-site events, including an opening party at the POPL mansion in Beverly Hills and a pitch competition with a $5K cash purse. Additionally, Dapper Labs will be releasing an NFT wallet for the conference for all attendees.

Learn more: https://startupstarter.co/ecw

Use code: AILAATECW for 20% off GA tickets