ALERT: Xcel will soon begin a planned power outage in parts of #Boulder County due to high winds and fire danger:

@CUBoulder And 5. when trust is lost, it adapts to rebuild it.

@CUBoulder Based on Behzadan's research, an optimally trustworthy AI tool has a few essential qualities: 1. It knows its users. 2. It’s reliable, ethical and transparent. 3. It takes context into account. 4. It’s easy to use and asks users how it’s doing. ...

@CUBoulder People vary in how inherently trusting they are, but AI also has to earn our trust by doing its job reliably and safely. AI technology also becomes better and more reliable when more people use it.

Hey #Boulder, here's a story for our times...I spoke to @CUBoulder prof Amir Behzadan about his research on making AI more trustworthy. AI is everywhere in our modern lives, but whether we choose to use AI tech often comes down to how much we trust it. https://t.co/5Na7CXJaHc

@CUBoulder There are ways to reduce the risk (e.g. diversifying and using multiple cloud service providers instead of a single one). But ultimately, these types of system outages are always a risk.

@CUBoulder There's no guaranteed way to prevent an outage like this from happening again, especially with the number of companies and services relying on AWS and other centralized cloud platforms.

@CUBoulder While it's not clear exactly what caused the outage, Perigo said it was probably caused by a minor misconfiguration or script error that was deployed across many systems.

@CUBoulder During the outage, many services and websites hosted by AWS -- from Zoom and Venmo to Snapchat and Reddit -- couldn't "find" each other, so websites and apps appeared broken or offline.

@CUBoulder Perigo told me the outage likely cost businesses hundreds of billions of dollars. The problem started with a failure in the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website URLS into IP addresses that computers can use to communicate.

Howdy #Boulder. After this week's AWS network outage, I spoke with Levi Perigo from @CUBoulder's network engineering program to learn more about the outage: what happened, who it affected, what caused it and why it could happen again. https://t.co/wt3ch0PeY5

Moose on the loose in #Boulder

@CUBoulder Normal rabies vaccines need 3-5 doses, but Randolph's shots combine multiple doses into a single shot, and each dose is coated in a timed-release sapphire layer. These shots can be stored in a dry powder form and delivered to parts of the world that lack cold-storage capacity.

@CUBoulder Then, the candied particles are coated with a nanoscopic layer of sapphire. Sapphire dissolves slowly once injected into a patient, so it protects the vaccine particles for days to weeks, depending on the thickness of the sapphire layer.

@CUBoulder In Randolph's method for making the vaccines, the vaccine particles are sprayed with a hard candy-like substance, which entraps and preserves the proteins so they don't degrade at higher temperatures.

@CUBoulder That means it's all but impossible to deliver rabies shots in parts of the world that don’t have specialized cold storage equipment (or the electricity to run it).

@CUBoulder About 60,000 people per year still die of rabies. In industrialized countries, many people and pets have access to vaccines. But current vaccines on the market need to be stored cold because heat causes the proteins in them to break down.

Happy (rainy) Tuesday, #Boulder. I've got a new story for you all about a new temperature-stable, single-injection rabies vaccine developed by @CUBoulder researcher Ted Randolph. https://t.co/v362nYiUjK

@CUBoulder I had a blast talking with all the researchers for this story and visiting their hives near Boulder Creek. Made me very nostalgic for my backyard beekeeping days! 🐝

@CUBoulder Their building strategies could spark ideas for new bio-inspired structures or even new ways to approach 3D printing.