hr bartender Estimated reading time: 4 minutes There’s a reason that new hire buddy programs are popular. According to Gallup, employees who have a friend or buddy at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, have higher wellbeing, and are less likely to get injured on the job.  While the research supports having a buddy program, it doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t evaluate the program’s success. Just because a program exists doesn’t mean that all parts of the program are running smoothly. Especially when it comes to buddy programs, which have multiple stakeholders. In fact, that could be one approach to evaluating the program – check in with the four key stakeholders to confirm that program goals and objectives are being met. New hire employees. More than 28% of Americans are looking for new jobs, according to an article from NBC News. The last thing companies want is to spend a lot of time and resources hiring someone only to have them leave within the first year.  Check in with new hires to make sure they feel the buddy program is helpful. Organizations can create 1-2 question pulse surveys to collect data and benchmark results. They can also conduct focus groups with new hires to collect stories about how the program is working.  Hiring manager. A primary goal of creating an onboarding buddy program is productivity. The faster employees become engaged, the more productive they become. There’s a strong chance that the hiring manager is going to select the buddy, so they will be looking for feedback about how the buddy relationship is working.  Initially, it could be challenging to receive direct feedback from new hires and buddies about how the relationship is progressing. Electronic surveys could be a...

hr bartender Estimated reading time: 4 minutes There’s a reason that new hire buddy programs are popular. According to Gallup, employees who have a friend or buddy at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, have higher wellbeing, and are less likely to get injured on the job.  While the research supports having a buddy program, it doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t evaluate the program’s success. Just because a program exists doesn’t mean that all parts of the program are running smoothly. Especially when it comes to buddy programs, which have multiple stakeholders. In fact, that could be one approach to evaluating the program – check in with the four key stakeholders to confirm that program goals and objectives are being met. New hire employees. More than 28% of Americans are looking for new jobs, according to an article from NBC News. The last thing companies want is to spend a lot of time and resources hiring someone only to have them leave within the first year.  Check in with new hires to make sure they feel the buddy program is helpful. Organizations can create 1-2 question pulse surveys to collect data and benchmark results. They can also conduct focus groups with new hires to collect stories about how the program is working.  Hiring manager. A primary goal of creating an onboarding buddy program is productivity. The faster employees become engaged, the more productive they become. There’s a strong chance that the hiring manager is going to select the buddy, so they will be looking for feedback about how the buddy relationship is working.  Initially, it could be challenging to receive direct feedback from new hires and buddies about how the relationship is progressing. Electronic surveys could be a...

hr bartender Estimated reading time: 4 minutes New research from UKG indicates that 75% of frontline workers are feeling overworked and underpaid. The research also indicates that the number rises to 83% of Gen Z workers in the same sector. I realize that organizations are very focused on the bottom-line. Frankly, they always are. Putting profits over people is not a winning strategy.  But that’s not the focus of today’s article. The research got me thinking … what does it take to have a good day at work? Yes, obviously we need to feel like we’re being paid fairly, and we need to feel like our workload is manageable. Sometimes even when we have those things, we can have not-so-great days at work.  Recently, I listened to Caroline Webb’s LinkedIn Learning course titled “How to Have a Great Day at Work” and wanted to share my takeaways. Webb is an executive coach and author of the best-selling book “How to Have a Good Day”. As a reminder, if you do not have a LinkedIn Learning account, it’s possible your local library has a partnership with LinkedIn, and you can access this course for FREE with a library card.  In the course, Webb talks about our brains and how when are brains are tired this can impact our ability to get things done. That leads to crankiness and well, not having a good day. So, my first takeaway was if you’re not having a good day, maybe you need to ask yourself “Why?”. Can you isolate the reason? It could be a project you’re working on, and you’re stuck. Or a co-worker that’s annoying. Or maybe something at home.  Think about if it makes sense to have some sort of “work mood tracker” that might help to identify those things that are keeping...

hr bartender Estimated reading time: 4 minutes New research from UKG indicates that 75% of frontline workers are feeling overworked and underpaid. The research also indicates that the number rises to 83% of Gen Z workers in the same sector. I realize that organizations are very focused on the bottom-line. Frankly, they always are. Putting profits over people is not a winning strategy.  But that’s not the focus of today’s article. The research got me thinking … what does it take to have a good day at work? Yes, obviously we need to feel like we’re being paid fairly, and we need to feel like our workload is manageable. Sometimes even when we have those things, we can have not-so-great days at work.  Recently, I listened to Caroline Webb’s LinkedIn Learning course titled “How to Have a Great Day at Work” and wanted to share my takeaways. Webb is an executive coach and author of the best-selling book “How to Have a Good Day”. As a reminder, if you do not have a LinkedIn Learning account, it’s possible your local library has a partnership with LinkedIn, and you can access this course for FREE with a library card.  In the course, Webb talks about our brains and how when are brains are tired this can impact our ability to get things done. That leads to crankiness and well, not having a good day. So, my first takeaway was if you’re not having a good day, maybe you need to ask yourself “Why?”. Can you isolate the reason? It could be a project you’re working on, and you’re stuck. Or a co-worker that’s annoying. Or maybe something at home.  Think about if it makes sense to have some sort of “work mood tracker” that might help to identify those things that are keeping...

hr bartender Estimated reading time: 5 minutes (Editor’s Note: Today’s article is brought to you by our friends at ComplyRight, whose mission is to free employers from the burden of tracking and complying with the complex web of federal, state, and local employment laws, so you can stay focused on managing and growing the business. Enjoy the article!) Over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed an increase in subscription services. Subscription services can be good for customers because they get the products and/or services they need on a regular basis. Subscriptions bring real value because they require little, or no effort once initiated. For the businesses that offer them, a subscription model is beneficial because they can provide a scalable product or service to customers at a reasonable price. The reason I wanted to talk about subscription services is because there are financial articles that will suggest all subscription programs are bad or wrong. That’s simply not true. There are many subscription services that easily provide a positive return on investment (ROI). An example of a valuable subscription service that we use in our personal lives is credit monitoring. These services inform us of changes or alerts in areas that might damage our credit. This type of service has been in the media a lot recently with the news that there was a data breach exposing the social security numbers of millions of Americans.  Here are three examples of business-related subscription services that provide value to our organizations. Employment Law Alert Service This is an annual compliance service that allows organizations to stay current with employment related legislation at the federal, state, county, and city level. ComplyRight’s expert legal team monitors legislative activity around the United States including over 20,000 agencies. The type of activity being monitored includes minimum wage, salary...

hr bartender Estimated reading time: 5 minutes (Editor’s Note: Today’s article is brought to you by our friends at ComplyRight, whose mission is to free employers from the burden of tracking and complying with the complex web of federal, state, and local employment laws, so you can stay focused on managing and growing the business. Enjoy the article!) Over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed an increase in subscription services. Subscription services can be good for customers because they get the products and/or services they need on a regular basis. Subscriptions bring real value because they require little, or no effort once initiated. For the businesses that offer them, a subscription model is beneficial because they can provide a scalable product or service to customers at a reasonable price. The reason I wanted to talk about subscription services is because there are financial articles that will suggest all subscription programs are bad or wrong. That’s simply not true. There are many subscription services that easily provide a positive return on investment (ROI). An example of a valuable subscription service that we use in our personal lives is credit monitoring. These services inform us of changes or alerts in areas that might damage our credit. This type of service has been in the media a lot recently with the news that there was a data breach exposing the social security numbers of millions of Americans.  Here are three examples of business-related subscription services that provide value to our organizations. Employment Law Alert Service This is an annual compliance service that allows organizations to stay current with employment related legislation at the federal, state, county, and city level. ComplyRight’s expert legal team monitors legislative activity around the United States including over 20,000 agencies. The type of activity being monitored includes minimum wage, salary...

Personnel Today MoD announces new retention payments in ‘decisive action’ to tackle the long-term decline in Armed Forces numbers. The post Retention payments to tackle decline in armed forces appeared first on Personnel Today. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Rob Moss Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Personnel Today MoD announces new retention payments in ‘decisive action’ to tackle the long-term decline in Armed Forces numbers. The post Retention payments to tackle decline in armed forces appeared first on Personnel Today. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Rob Moss Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Personnel Today An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that analyses ECG readings during routine heart scans could identify people at risk of type... The post AI diabetes breakthrough, as NHS rolls out eye screening programme appeared first on Personnel Today. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Nic Paton Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Personnel Today More than a third of chartered accountants (36%) say they have suffered from insomnia or disrupted sleep over the past... The post Accountants experiencing ‘concerning’ levels of stress and burnout appeared first on Personnel Today. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Nic Paton Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Personnel Today City employers continue to invest in diversity, equity and inclusion despite having to cut costs in the past year, according... The post Investment management firms make DEI progress appeared first on Personnel Today. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Jo Faragher Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Personnel Today 12 December 2024 | Register now for our online masterclass focusing on recognising and managing neurodivergent employees in the workplace. The post Working well together: Supporting neurodivergent employees (online masterclass) appeared first on Personnel Today. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Rob Moss Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

TalentCulture Sponsored by SAP Concur In this episode we are going to reveal how AI is changing the landscape of business travel and expense management. We will unpack some recent travel-related research, and discuss how things are changing in this area of our lives. Whether you are a frequent business traveller, handling travel planning for your The post Embracing AI for Effective Business Travel & Expense Management appeared first on TalentCulture. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /mike@hivemindai.com Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

TalentCulture As someone who likes to keep a pulse on employee trends, it has saddened me to see the rise in workplace burnout. A 2022 survey reported that 78.7 percent of employees and leaders reported feeling stressed. I can only imagine that the number has increased over the last two years as requests for returning to The post How Play Transforms Office Culture and Productivity appeared first on TalentCulture. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Sofia Hernandez Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

TalentCulture I’m just going to come out and say it: the SAP SuccessConnect 2024 (October 28-30) was a blast. Why? For one thing it reminded me — and many I talked to — of HR tech-related events before the pandemic. It was a dense, bustling gathering of great minds, compelling ideas and groundbreaking innovations, and a The post HR Insights From Lisbon: SAP SuccessConnect 2024 appeared first on TalentCulture. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Meghan M. Biro Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

TalentCulture Sponsored by Reward Gateway | Edenred. In this episode we’re going to explore a topic that I truly enjoy: workplace culture and wellbeing. There are many ways to improve the overall lives of employees. It is so gratifying to see organizations deliver exceptional services that improve their wellbeing. If you have any interest in workplace The post A New Focus on Workplace Culture and Wellbeing appeared first on TalentCulture. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /mike@hivemindai.com Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

TalentCulture November being the penultimate month of the year, there’s a lot to reflect on around HR, talent and the workplace. One caveat to get out of the way: I’m not addressing the implications of the election here. I think we all need time to process, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. Here’s The post HR, Robots, and Talent in the Workplace: 6 Signs of the Times appeared first on TalentCulture. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Meghan M. Biro Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR Last spring, the Department of Labor announced the minimum salary required for an employee to be considered salaried exempt would jump up from $684 per week to $1,059 per week, or $55,068 per year. This was a two-step process, with the minimum salary jumping to 844 per week ($43,888 annually) in July. A Texas federal judge ended all that on Friday, ruling that the Department of Labor had overstepped its bounds and sending the minimum salary for salary exemption back to $684 per week, or $35,568 annually. Employees who are exempt are not eligible for overtime regardless of how many hours they work. If you have employees who you switched to hourly pay in July or to whom you gave a raise so you could keep the exemption, you can undo that. But first, think through what this means and what could still happen. To keep reading, click here: If You Were Nervous About the Salary Exemption Minimum Jumping to $55,068 a Year, Don’t Be. A Texas Federal Judge Just Quashed It The post If You Were Nervous About the Salary Exemption Minimum Jumping to $55,068 a Year, Don’t Be. A Texas Federal Judge Just Quashed It appeared first on Improve Your HR. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Evil HR Lady Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR Name recognition in a company is generally a good thing–and can be very helpful when it comes to recruiting. But that’s not the reason Tesla can get away with lower salaries than those offered by their competitors. (And by competitors, I mean companies who compete for the same talent, not necessarily companies who make the same products.) The reason is Elon Musk‘s compensation strategy, which may not seem logical at first glance. But there is a method behind it: according to a Business Insider analysis of Tesla data from 2021 (which, granted, is a long time ago in the world of hiring), Tesla pays less in straight salary but offers more in stock. Why stock vs salary is an important difference Both stock and salary are about money and paying someone for their work, but there’s an important distinction: employees get their regular pay (whether it be hourly or salaried) as long as they are employed. Whether they do a good job or a mediocre one, their company deposits money into their bank account every two weeks. To keep reading, click here: Tesla Offers Lower Salaries Than Its Top Competitors. The Reason Why Is a Brilliant Lesson in Great Leadership The post Tesla Offers Lower Salaries Than Its Top Competitors. The Reason Why Is a Brilliant Lesson in Great Leadership appeared first on Improve Your HR. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Evil HR Lady Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR Last week, Nick Fuentes, who Wikipedia describes as “an American far-right political pundit and live streamer who promotes white supremacist, misogynistic, and antisemitic views,” tweeted this: Your body, my choice. Forever. — Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) November 6, 2024 I sincerely hoped no one would pay attention. And, indeed, in my own life, I’ve only seen people roundly condemning this. But then I saw things like this LinkedIn post from Kim Jage, co-founder and CMO at Jage Media: “Your body, my choice” is spreading like wild fire on my teenagers’ school campus’s. This is not going away. I’m sure at least some of these teenagers think they are being funny. To keep reading, click here: ‘Your Body, My Choice’ Posts Are Spreading Post-Election. Anyone Who Says This Should Be Fired–Immediately  The post ‘Your Body, My Choice’ Posts Are Spreading Post-Election. Anyone Who Says This Should Be Fired–Immediately appeared first on Improve Your HR. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Evil HR Lady Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR In September, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Midland, Texas, to speak at the Permian Basin SHRM conference. The PBSHM people have so graciously allowed me to share my speech with all of you! Also, don’t forget to register for HR Vision ’25! Get your registration in ASAP If you need a plan for 2025, this is the place for you to be! Learn more and register here: HR Vision ’25 The post PBSHRM Taking Control of Your HR Life appeared first on Improve Your HR. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Evil HR Lady Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR Donald Trump thoroughly beat Vice President Kamala Harris in this week’s election, winning the electoral college and popular vote. Was this a further example of the glass cliff, where when a company (or in this case, an entire political party) is in trouble, they send in a woman who takes the inevitable fall? To be clear, I think the answer to this is no. So many things go into this election loss that you can’t sum it up in a trite phrase. However, because Biden stepped down from the election before the Democratic convention, they could have nominated anyone who fit the legal requirements. And they nominated Harris. To keep reading, click here: Was Kamala Harris a Victim of the Glass Cliff?  The post Was Kamala Harris a Victim of the Glass Cliff? appeared first on Improve Your HR. Go to Source 23/11/2024 - 06:44 /Evil HR Lady Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

HBR.org Policies and individual common sense will only get you so far. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:07 /Gabriele Rosani Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

HBR.org A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Bill Sahlman on creating a focused strategy for growth. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:07 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

HBR.org Psychologist Art Markman takes questions from listeners who are struggling to manage difficult employees and offers advice for how to give your initial feedback and follow up. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:07 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

BBC News Speaking about her new role, Dame Jasvinder Sanghera says Al Fayed's "tentacles went far and wide". Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:07 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Target missed on earnings and revenue even as it cut prices on thousands of items, including milk, diapers and toys, to try to attract discerning shoppers. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:07 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Comcast on Wednesday announced the spinoff of its cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC and E!. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:07 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Gary Wang was the fifth former FTX executive to be handed a punishment for his role in the collapse of the crypto exchange in late 2022. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:06 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News The platform fee is RM0.50 on the UP app, while the commission is RM2.50 for trades below 100 shares. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:06 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News The move will take the number of Singapore data centres in Keppel DC Reit’s portfolio to eight. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:06 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News STI ended 0.4 per cent or 14.33 points lower at 3,743.64. Go to Source 20/11/2024 - 17:06 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Microsoft Teams is an enterprise collaboration tool that allows you to build a unified workspace for real-time collaboration and communication, meetings, and file and application sharing. You can exchange and store valuable organizational knowledge within Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams data is often siloed across different teams, channels, and chats, making it difficult to get a unified view of organizational knowledge. Also, important information gets buried in lengthy chat threads or lost in channel backlogs over time. You can use Amazon Q Business to solve those challenges. Amazon Q Business is a generative AI-powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems. It empowers employees to be more creative, data-driven, efficient, prepared, and productive. Integrating Amazon Q with Microsoft Teams enables you to index all disparate data into a single searchable repository. You can use natural language capabilities to ask questions to surface relevant insights from Microsoft Teams data. With Amazon Q, you don’t have to constantly switch between different Microsoft Teams workspaces and apps to find information. You can query for Microsoft Teams data alongside other enterprise data sources from one interface with proper access controls. In this post, we show how to connect your Microsoft Teams with Amazon Q using the Amazon Q Business Microsoft Teams connector. We also walk through the connector’s capabilities and common challenges faced when setting it up. Overview of the Amazon Q Business Microsoft Teams connector A data source connector is a mechanism for integrating and synchronizing data from multiple repositories into one container index. When you use the data source connector, Amazon Q will have its own index where you can add and sync documents. The document is a unit of data, and how to...

Coronavirus | The Guardian Patrick Ruane had targeted individuals online including chief medical officerA Covid denier who suggested “whacking” Prof Sir Chris Whitty with a rounders bat has been jailed for five years after being convicted of encouraging terrorism.Messages posted by Patrick Ruane on social media were described by a judge who sentenced him at the Old Bailey as “extremely dangerous” during a volatile time. Continue reading... Go to Source 13/11/2024 - 15:31 /Ben Quinn Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR I love Halloween. It’s a great holiday around costumes and candy. But sometimes highly qualified HR professionals feel like they are just dressed up as HR professionals. (For a Halloween treat, use coupon code Halloween, today only, when you register for HR Vision ’25!) Imposter syndrome is real. And if you’re suffering from it, it’s likely that you need a boost to help you build your confidence. You need some additional training so you can be confident in what you do. Here’s how you can figure out if you’re suffering from imposter syndrome: You double-check everything. Even though you know in your heart, FMLA is for 12 weeks, you find yourself googling whenever someone asks. You don’t apply for jobs because you’re not ready for a director-level role, even though you have 15 years of high-performance experience. You don’t speak up in meetings. You’re the people expert, why is your mouth shut? Or might you be suffering from something even worse: Expert Syndrome? This is when you are convinced you are an expert on something even though you really are not. Here’s how you can figure out if you’re suffering from expert syndrome: You have an answer for everything. A real expert knows her limits and will say so. Someone with Expert syndrome will never admit that it is outside her realm of knowledge–often because she simply doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Research=Googling. Anyone whose expertise comes from doing “research” on the internet isn’t a real expert. Real experts have experience in their field and read or do real primary research. You don’t ever need to check. If you ask an expert a complicated question, she might reply, “I think it’s X, but let me double check.” If you ask someone with expert syndrome a complicated question,...

HBR.org Sponsor content from Samsara. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

HBR.org How to classify the type of uncertainty you’re facing and respond accordingly. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 /Oguz A. Acar Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

HBR.org A series of studies with more than 1,100 U.S.-based adults found that nicknames can have positive effects — sometimes. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 /Zhe Zhang Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

BBC News At least 158 people have died in Spain's worst flooding disaster in decades as rescuers race to find victims. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

BBC News The BBC has visited Paiporta, Valencia, where dozens of people have been confirmed dead. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

BBC News The NHS is exempt from the rise in employer National Insurance contributions, but private providers are not. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Apple's services business has become a critical part of the company's appeal to Wall Street over the past decade. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reassured shareholders that the company expects to make money on its generative AI investments. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Intel reported better-than-expected earnings following a quarter filled with challenges. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News Deal said to value Olam Agri at about US$4 billion. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News It is the biggest reported case of stock market price spoofing detected in SGX. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News Value of new home sales rose 7.1 per cent from a year earlier in October. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:36 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed During this lecture, Jenny Radesky, M.D., and Megan Moreno, M.D., M.S.Ed., M.P.H., will discuss youth-centered approaches to social media research and their impact on frameworks, methods, and products. Go to Source 01/11/2024 - 07:29 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Recently, we’ve been witnessing the rapid development and evolution of generative AI applications, with observability and evaluation emerging as critical aspects for developers, data scientists, and stakeholders. Observability refers to the ability to understand the internal state and behavior of a system by analyzing its outputs, logs, and metrics. Evaluation, on the other hand, involves assessing the quality and relevance of the generated outputs, enabling continual improvement. Comprehensive observability and evaluation are essential for troubleshooting, identifying bottlenecks, optimizing applications, and providing relevant, high-quality responses. Observability empowers you to proactively monitor and analyze your generative AI applications, and evaluation helps you collect feedback, refine models, and enhance output quality. In the context of Amazon Bedrock, observability and evaluation become even more crucial. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. As the complexity and scale of these applications grow, providing comprehensive observability and robust evaluation mechanisms are essential for maintaining high performance, quality, and user satisfaction. We have built a custom observability solution that Amazon Bedrock users can quickly implement using just a few key building blocks and existing logs using FMs, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, and Amazon Bedrock Agents. This solution uses decorators in your application code to capture and log metadata such as input prompts, output results, run time, and custom metadata, offering enhanced security, ease of use, flexibility, and integration with native AWS services. Notably, the solution supports comprehensive Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) evaluation so you can assess the quality and relevance of generated responses, identify areas for...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Batch inference in Amazon Bedrock efficiently processes large volumes of data using foundation models (FMs) when real-time results aren’t necessary. It’s ideal for workloads that aren’t latency sensitive, such as obtaining embeddings, entity extraction, FM-as-judge evaluations, and text categorization and summarization for business reporting tasks. A key advantage is its cost-effectiveness, with batch inference workloads charged at a 50% discount compared to On-Demand pricing. Refer to Supported Regions and models for batch inference for current supporting AWS Regions and models. Although batch inference offers numerous benefits, it’s limited to 10 batch inference jobs submitted per model per Region. To address this consideration and enhance your use of batch inference, we’ve developed a scalable solution using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB. This post guides you through implementing a queue management system that automatically monitors available job slots and submits new jobs as slots become available. We walk you through our solution, detailing the core logic of the Lambda functions. By the end, you’ll understand how to implement this solution so you can maximize the efficiency of your batch inference workflows on Amazon Bedrock. For instructions on how to start your Amazon Bedrock batch inference job, refer to Enhance call center efficiency using batch inference for transcript summarization with Amazon Bedrock. The power of batch inference Organizations can use batch inference to process large volumes of data asynchronously, making it ideal for scenarios where real-time results are not critical. This capability...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Professionals in a wide variety of industries have adopted digital video conferencing tools as part of their regular meetings with suppliers, colleagues, and customers. These meetings often involve exchanging information and discussing actions that one or more parties must take after the session. The traditional way to make sure information and actions aren’t forgotten is to take notes during the session; a manual and tedious process that can be error-prone, particularly in a high-activity or high-pressure scenario. Furthermore, these notes are usually personal and not stored in a central location, which is a lost opportunity for businesses to learn what does and doesn’t work, as well as how to improve their sales, purchasing, and communication processes. This post presents a solution where you can upload a recording of your meeting (a feature available in most modern digital communication services such as Amazon Chime) to a centralized video insights and summarization engine. This engine uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services and generative AI on AWS to extract transcripts, produce a summary, and provide a sentiment for the call. The solution notes the logged actions per individual and provides suggested actions for the uploader. All of this data is centralized and can be used to improve metrics in scenarios such as sales or call centers. Many commercial generative AI solutions available are expensive and require user-based licenses. In contrast, our solution is an open-source project powered by Amazon Bedrock, offering a cost-effective alternative without those limitations. This solution can help your organizations’ sales, sales engineering, and support functions become more efficient and customer-focused by reducing the need to take notes during customer calls. Use case overview The organization in this scenario has noticed that during customer calls, some actions often get skipped due to the...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Enterprises in industries like manufacturing, finance, and healthcare are inundated with a constant flow of documents—from financial reports and contracts to patient records and supply chain documents. Historically, processing and extracting insights from these unstructured data sources has been a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task. However, the rise of intelligent document processing (IDP), which uses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to automate the extraction, classification, and analysis of data from various document types is transforming the game. For manufacturers, this means streamlining processes like purchase order management, invoice processing, and supply chain documentation. Financial services firms can accelerate workflows around loan applications, account openings, and regulatory reporting. And in healthcare, IDP revolutionizes patient onboarding, claims processing, and medical record keeping. By integrating IDP into their operations, organizations across these key industries experience transformative benefits: increased efficiency and productivity through the reduction of manual data entry, improved accuracy and compliance by reducing human errors, enhanced customer experiences due to faster document processing, greater scalability to handle growing volumes of documents, and lower operational costs associated with document management. This post demonstrates how to build an IDP pipeline for automatically extracting and processing data from documents using Amazon Bedrock Prompt Flows, a fully managed service that enables you to build generative AI workflow using Amazon Bedrock and other services in an intuitive visual builder. Amazon Bedrock Prompt Flows allows you to quickly update your pipelines as your business changes, scaling your document processing workflows to help meet evolving demands. Solution overview To be scalable and cost-effective, this solution uses serverless technologies and managed services. In addition to Amazon Bedrock Prompt Flows, the solution uses the following services: Amazon Textract – Automatically extracts printed text, handwriting, and data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)...

AWS Machine Learning Blog This post is part of an ongoing series on governing the machine learning (ML) lifecycle at scale. To start from the beginning, refer to Governing the ML lifecycle at scale, Part 1: A framework for architecting ML workloads using Amazon SageMaker. A multi-account strategy is essential not only for improving governance but also for enhancing security and control over the resources that support your organization’s business. This approach enables various teams within your organization to experiment, innovate, and integrate more rapidly while keeping the production environment secure and available for your customers. However, because multiple teams might use your ML platform in the cloud, monitoring large ML workloads across a scaling multi-account environment presents challenges in setting up and monitoring telemetry data that is scattered across multiple accounts. In this post, we dive into setting up observability in a multi-account environment with Amazon SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor allows you to automatically monitor ML models in production, and alerts you when data and model quality issues appear. SageMaker Model Monitor emits per-feature metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, which you can use to set up dashboards and alerts. You can use cross-account observability in CloudWatch to search, analyze, and correlate cross-account telemetry data stored in CloudWatch such as metrics, logs, and traces from one centralized account. You can now set up a central observability AWS account and connect your other accounts as sources. Then you can search, audit, and analyze logs across your applications to drill down into operational issues in a matter of seconds. You can discover and visualize operational and model metrics from many accounts in a single place and create alarms that evaluate metrics belonging to other accounts. AWS CloudTrail is also essential for maintaining security and compliance in your AWS environment by providing a...

NIMH News Feed A new study, funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, showed that a new medication derived from ketamine is safe and acceptable for use in humans, setting the stage for clinical trials testing it for hard-to-treat mental disorders like severe depression. Go to Source 30/10/2024 - 16:55 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import. This feature empowers customers to import and use their customized models alongside existing foundation models (FMs) through a single, unified API. Whether leveraging fine-tuned models like Meta Llama, Mistral Mixtral, and IBM Granite, or developing proprietary models based on popular open-source architectures, customers can now bring their custom models into Amazon Bedrock without the overhead of managing infrastructure or model lifecycle tasks. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing FMs from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Amazon Bedrock offers a serverless experience, so you can get started quickly, privately customize FMs with your own data, and integrate and deploy them into your applications using AWS tools without having to manage infrastructure. With Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import, customers can access their imported custom models on demand in a serverless manner, freeing them from the complexities of deploying and scaling models themselves. They’re able to accelerate generative AI application development by using native Amazon Bedrock tools and features such as Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, Agents, and more—all through a unified and consistent developer experience. Benefits of Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import include: Flexibility to use existing fine-tuned models:Customers can use their prior investments in model customization by importing existing customized models into Amazon Bedrock without the need to recreate or retrain them. This flexibility maximizes the value of previous efforts and accelerates application development. Integration with Amazon Bedrock Features: Imported custom models can be seamlessly integrated with the native tools and features of Amazon Bedrock, such...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Generative AI adoption among various industries is revolutionizing different types of applications, including image editing. Image editing is used in various sectors, such as graphic designing, marketing, and social media. Users rely on specialized tools for editing images. Building a custom solution for this task can be complex. However, by using various AWS services, you can quickly deploy a serverless solution to edit images. This approach can give your teams access to image editing foundation models (FMs) using Amazon Bedrock. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that makes FMs from leading AI startups and Amazon available through an API, so you can choose from a wide range of FMs to find the model that’s best suited for your use case. Amazon Bedrock is serverless, so you can get started quickly, privately customize FMs with your own data, and integrate and deploy them into your applications using AWS tools without having to manage infrastructure. Amazon Titan Image Generator G1 is an AI FM available with Amazon Bedrock that allows you to generate an image from text, or upload and edit your own image. Some of the key features we focus on include inpainting and outpainting. This post introduces a solution that simplifies the deployment of a web application for image editing using AWS serverless services. We use AWS Amplify, Amazon Cognito, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Bedrock with the Amazon Titan Image Generator G1 model to build an application to edit images using prompts. We cover the inner workings of the solution to help you understand the function of each service and how they are connected to give you a complete solution. At the time of writing this post, Amazon Titan Image Generator G1 comes in two versions; for this post, we use version...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Many organizations are building generative AI applications powered by large language models (LLMs) to boost productivity and build differentiated experiences. These LLMs are large and complex and deploying them requires powerful computing resources and results in high inference costs. For businesses and researchers with limited resources, the high inference costs of generative AI models can be a barrier to enter the market, so more efficient and cost-effective solutions are needed. Most generative AI use cases involve human interaction, which requires AI accelerators that can deliver real time response rates with low latency. At the same time, the pace of innovation in generative AI is increasing, and it’s becoming more challenging for developers and researchers to quickly evaluate and adopt new models to keep pace with the market. One of ways to get started with LLMs such as Llama and Mistral are by using Amazon Bedrock. However, customers who want to deploy LLMs in their own self-managed workflows for greater control and flexibility of underlying resources can use these LLMs optimized on top of AWS Inferentia2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Inf2 instances. In this blog post, we will introduce how to use an Amazon EC2 Inf2 instance to cost-effectively deploy multiple industry-leading LLMs on AWS Inferentia2, a purpose-built AWS AI chip, helping customers to quickly test and open up an API interface to facilitate performance benchmarking and downstream application calls at the same time. Model introduction There are many popular open source LLMs to choose from, and for this blog post, we will review three different use cases based on model expertise using Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-instruct-v0.2, and CodeLlama-7b-instruct-hf. Model name Release company Number of parameters Release time Model capabilities Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct Meta 8 billion April 2024 Language understanding, translation, code generation, inference, chat Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 Mistral AI 7.3...

AWS Machine Learning Blog In Part 1 of this series, we explored best practices for creating accurate and reliable agents using Amazon Bedrock Agents. Amazon Bedrock Agents help you accelerate generative AI application development by orchestrating multistep tasks. Agents use the reasoning capability of foundation models (FMs) to create a plan that decomposes the problem into multiple steps. The model is augmented with the developer-provided instruction to create an orchestration plan and then carry out the plan. The agent can use company APIs and external knowledge through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). In this second part, we dive into the architectural considerations and development lifecycle practices that can help you build robust, scalable, and secure intelligent agents. Whether you are just starting to explore the world of conversational AI or looking to optimize your existing agent deployments, this comprehensive guide can provide valuable long-term insights and practical tips to help you achieve your goals. Enable comprehensive logging and observability From the outset of your agent development journey, you should implement thorough logging and observability practices. This is crucial for debugging, auditing, and troubleshooting your agents. The first step to achieve comprehensive logging is to enable Amazon Bedrock model invocation logging to capture prompts and responses securely in your account. Amazon Bedrock Agents also provides you with traces, a detailed overview of the steps being orchestrated by the agents, the underlying prompts invoking the FM, the references being returned from the knowledge bases, and code being generated by the agent. Trace events are streamed in real time, which allows you to customize UX cues to keep the end-user informed about the progress of their request. You can log your agent’s traces and use them to track and troubleshoot your agents. When moving agent applications to production, it’s a best practice to set...

AWS Machine Learning Blog This post is co-written by Rodrigo Amaral, Ashwin Murthy and Meghan Stronach from Qualcomm. In this post, we introduce an innovative solution for end-to-end model customization and deployment at the edge using Amazon SageMaker and Qualcomm AI Hub. This seamless cloud-to-edge AI development experience will enable developers to create optimized, highly performant, and custom managed machine learning solutions where you can bring you own model (BYOM) and bring your own data (BYOD) to meet varied business requirements across industries. From real-time analytics and predictive maintenance to personalized customer experiences and autonomous systems, this approach caters to diverse needs. We demonstrate this solution by walking you through a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to fine-tune YOLOv8, a real-time object detection model, on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using a custom dataset. The process uses a single ml.g5.2xlarge instance (providing one NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPU) with SageMaker for fine-tuning. After fine-tuning, we show you how to optimize the model with Qualcomm AI Hub so that it’s ready for deployment across edge devices powered by Snapdragon and Qualcomm platforms. Business challenge Today, many developers use AI and machine learning (ML) models to tackle a variety of business cases, from smart identification and natural language processing (NLP) to AI assistants. While open source models offer a good starting point, they often don’t meet the specific needs of the applications being developed. This is where model customization becomes essential, allowing developers to tailor models to their unique requirements and ensure optimal performance for specific use cases. In addition, on-device AI deployment is a game-changer for developers crafting use cases that demand immediacy, privacy, and reliability. By processing data locally, edge AI minimizes latency, ensures sensitive information stays on-device, and guarantees functionality even in poor connectivity. Developers are therefore looking for an end-to-end...

NIMH News Feed This webinar is designed for parents, caregivers, and educators who want to understand better and address the needs of children with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:44 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed During this webinar, experts in graduate education and systemic-change management will discuss evidence-based practices and case studies of successful holistic admissions programs. The webinar will provide faculty, admission officers, and other higher education professionals with a roadmap for implementing mission-driven systemic change in graduate admissions. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:43 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Adults with undiagnosed ADHD should avoid self-diagnosis and ask their doctor about their symptoms. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:43 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Kids who received the GLP-1 medications semaglutide or liraglutide were less likely to have suicidal thoughts or attempts than those treated with behavioral interventions. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:43 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Falsehoods spread when uncertainties—and emotions—are high after hurricanes. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:43 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Students who experienced racism said their mental health also deteriorated, a new study showed. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:43 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire In the U.S., only 40% of men with a reported mental illness received mental health care services in the past year, as compared to 52% of women with a reported mental illness. Go to Source 19/10/2024 - 07:43 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR   T Tomorrow is the day! Join HRLearns as we host Brenda Neckvatal as she helps people Understand the traits of narcissism Recognizing manipulative behavior Developing strategies for dealing with a narcissistic employee How to provide clear direction and feedback Learn to avoid enabling narcissistic behavior This will be well worth your time to attend! Register at HRLearns. About our speaker: Brenda Neckvatal is an international award-winning HR professional and two time Best Selling Author. Not only does she help business leaders get the people side of their business right, she is a specialist in crisis management, government contracting HR compliance, and mentor to rising entrepreneurs, business leaders, HR champions and professionals. Brenda has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Inc, as well as US News and World Reports. She started as an HR sprout after a solid fourteen-year career in retail management. She really enjoys helping people solve their unique problems, and human resources offered her the ability to support her co-workers more. Having the benefit of working for six Fortune 500 companies, she converted her experience into advising her audience to use tried and trusted best practices that help small businesses achieve their workforce goals. In her combined 30-year career in human resources and business, she has consulted to over 500 small businesses and C-suite leaders. She has optimized employee effectiveness and helped mitigate the high costs associated with making hasty employment-related decisions. She has been involved with employee situations where they have engaged in workplace violence, a near stabbing, deliberately inciting fear in other coworkers, stalking women, breaches of protocol around national security,  assault, suicide, death, homicide, and a potential active shooter. Brenda is a devoted volunteer in the Navy SEAL Community and is constantly finding new ways of supporting veterans of Naval Special...

NIMH News Feed The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is pleased to announce that Anna Lau, Ph.D., has been selected as the 2024 James S. Jackson Memorial Award winner. Join us on October 18 to attend her award ceremony and lecture. Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:24 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Employees are becoming increasingly anxious as they note their companies are monitoring their work from behind the scenes. Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:24 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Making new social connections, getting better sleep, and having new experiences—could help lower your risk of premature aging. Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:24 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire The findings could help inform future studies that investigate increased risk of negative outcomes in LGBTQ+ subgroups to understand the specific challenges for each. Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:24 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Generative AI models can produce information on a wide range of topics, but their application brings new challenges. These include maintaining relevance, avoiding toxic content, protecting sensitive information like personally identifiable information (PII), and mitigating hallucinations. Although foundation models (FMs) on Amazon Bedrock offer built-in protections, these are often model-specific and might not fully align with an organization’s use cases or responsible AI principles. As a result, developers frequently need to implement additional customized safety and privacy controls. This need becomes more pronounced when organizations use multiple FMs across different use cases, because maintaining consistent safeguards is crucial for accelerating development cycles and implementing a uniform approach to responsible AI. In April 2024, we announced the general availability of Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to help you introduce safeguards, prevent harmful content, and evaluate models against key safety criteria. With Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, you can implement safeguards in your generative AI applications that are customized to your use cases and responsible AI policies. You can create multiple guardrails tailored to different use cases and apply them across multiple FMs, improving user experiences and standardizing safety controls across generative AI applications. In addition, to enable safeguarding applications using different FMs, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now supports the ApplyGuardrail API to evaluate user inputs and model responses for custom and third-party FMs available outside of Amazon Bedrock. In this post, we discuss how you can use the ApplyGuardrail API in common generative AI architectures such as third-party or self-hosted large language models (LLMs), or in a self-managed Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, as shown in the following figure. Solution overview For this post, we create a guardrail that stops our FM from providing fiduciary advice. The full list of configurations for the guardrail is available in the GitHub repo. You can...

AWS Machine Learning Blog This post was co-written with Anthony Medeiros, Manager of Solutions Engineering and Architecture for North America Artificial Intelligence, and Adrian Boeh, Senior Data Scientist – NAM AI, from Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric is a global leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation. The company specializes in providing integrated solutions that make energy safe, reliable, efficient, and sustainable. Schneider Electric serves a wide range of industries, including smart manufacturing, resilient infrastructure, future-proof data centers, intelligent buildings, and intuitive homes. They offer products and services that encompass electrical distribution, industrial automation, and energy management. Their innovative technologies, extensive range of products, and commitment to sustainability position Schneider Electric as a key player in advancing smart and green solutions for the modern world. As demand for renewable energy continues to rise, Schneider Electric faces high demand for sustainable microgrid infrastructure. This demand comes in the form of requests for proposals (RFPs), each of which needs to be manually reviewed by a microgrid subject matter expert (SME) at Schneider. Manual review of each RFP was proving too costly and couldn’t be scaled to meet the industry needs. To solve the problem, Schneider turned to Amazon Bedrock and generative artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. In this post, we show how the team at Schneider collaborated with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center (GenAIIC) to build a generative AI solution on Amazon Bedrock to solve this problem. The solution processes and evaluates each RFP and then routes high-value RFPs...

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Refugees who practiced self-compassion were found to experience significantly less depression and anxiety than those who did not. Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:24 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Madeleine Finlay is joined by Ian Sample, the Guardian’s science editor and Science Weekly co-host, to answer the questions we are all asking about Covid this autumn, from what is going on with the new variant XEC to how to get a vaccine and what scientists think the government should be doing differentlyCovid on the rise as experts say England has ‘capitulated’ to the virus Continue reading... Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:23 /Presented by Madeleine Finlay with Ian Sample, produced by Ellie Sans, sound design by Joel Cox, the executive producer is Ellie Bury Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Depressive symptoms can manifest in different ways. Often, they can interrupt your sleep quality. Go to Source 05/10/2024 - 15:23 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed This webinar will discuss the latest research on factors that impact depression and suicidality in autistic people and how to use community-based methods to develop effective interventions. Go to Source 30/09/2024 - 15:40 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire The scientifically discredited treatment, which aims to change an LGBTQ person's sexual orientation or gender identity, is now banned for minors in 24 states. Go to Source 23/09/2024 - 22:10 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Certain brain regions may shrink in size during pregnancy yet improve in connectivity. Go to Source 23/09/2024 - 22:10 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Engaging in creative activities can significantly boost well-being by providing meaningful spaces for expression and achievement. Go to Source 23/09/2024 - 22:10 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Parents who stare at their screens instead of talking to their kids aren’t just modeling poor behavior — they could be hindering their children’s language development. Go to Source 23/09/2024 - 22:09 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire A tight crew that does everything together isn’t that common, and it’s unrealistic for many of us. Go to Source 23/09/2024 - 22:09 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News Semiconductor manufacturing equipment was one of the products supporting its export performance. Go to Source 18/09/2024 - 06:06 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technology holds the promise to revolutionize gene editing technologies, which is transformative to the way we understand and treat diseases. This technique is based in a natural mechanism found in bacteria that allows a protein coupled to a single guide RNA (gRNA) strand to locate and make cuts in specific sites in the targeted genome. Being able to computationally predict the efficiency and specificity of gRNA is central to the success of gene editing. Transcribed from DNA sequences, RNA is an important type of biological sequence of ribonucleotides (A, U, G, C), which folds into 3D structure. Benefiting from recent advance in large language models (LLMs), a variety of computational biology tasks can be solved by fine-tuning biological LLMs pre-trained on billions of known biological sequences. The downstream tasks on RNAs are relatively understudied. In this post, we adopt a pre-trained genomic LLMs for gRNA efficiency prediction. The idea is to treat a computer designed gRNA as a sentence, and fine-tune the LLM to perform sentence-level regression tasks analogous to sentiment analysis. We used Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods to reduce the number of parameters and GPU usage for this task. Solution overview Large language models (LLMs) have gained a lot of interest for their ability to encode syntax and semantics of natural languages. The neural architecture behind LLMs are transformers, which are comprised of attention-based encoder-decoder blocks that generate an internal representation of the data they are trained from (encoder) and are able to generate sequences in the same latent space that resemble the original data (decoder). Due to their success in natural language, recent works have explored the use of LLMs for molecular biology information, which is sequential in nature. DNABERT is a pre-trained transformer model with non-overlapping...

AWS Machine Learning Blog This post is co-written with Pradeep Prabhakaran from Cohere. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a powerful technique that can help enterprises develop generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps that integrate real-time data and enable rich, interactive conversations using proprietary data. RAG allows these AI applications to tap into external, reliable sources of domain-specific knowledge, enriching the context for the language model as it answers user queries. However, the reliability and accuracy of the responses hinges on finding the right source materials. Therefore, honing the search process in RAG is crucial to boosting the trustworthiness of the generated responses. RAG systems are important tools for building search and retrieval systems, but they often fall short of expectations due to suboptimal retrieval steps. This can be enhanced using a rerank step to improve search quality. RAG is an approach that combines information retrieval techniques with natural language processing (NLP) to enhance the performance of text generation or language modeling tasks. This method involves retrieving relevant information from a large corpus of text data and using it to augment the generation process. The key idea is to incorporate external knowledge or context into the model to improve the accuracy, diversity, and relevance of the generated responses. Workflow of RAG Orchestration The RAG orchestration generally consists of two steps: Retrieval – RAG fetches relevant documents from an external data source using the generated search queries. When presented with the search queries, the RAG-based application searches the data source for relevant documents or passages. Grounded generation – Using the retrieved documents or passages, the generation model creates educated answers with inline citations using the fetched documents. The following diagram shows the RAG workflow. Document retrieval in RAG orchestration One technique for retrieving documents in a RAG orchestration is dense retrieval, which is...

NIMH News Feed In this webinar, presenters will discuss risk factors that Mexican-origin individuals may face, including discrimination and acculturation stress. They will also discuss research that examines how factors such as familism, ethnic pride, and temperament can help promote resilience among people of Mexican origin. Go to Source 17/09/2024 - 20:02 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Improve Your HR I’ve worked under the “Evil HR Lady” brand since 2006. On Tuesday, I changed it to “Improve Your HR.“ Evil HR Lady was a solid brand name with good recognition. I still think it’s funny, and I’m very glad I chose it when I started blogging about HR back in the days of Blogspot. But it was time for a change. Here are five reasons I decided to change my brand name. New logo designed by Charlie Lythgoe C5 Designs My purpose (and audience) changed “Evil HR Lady” and “Improve Your HR” are both about HR, but my approach to HR has changed over the years. When I launched my blog, my goal was to write an advice column that would explain human resources to non-HR people. I wanted to give regular employees (who often see HR as “evil”) an inside view. And I continue to do that! But about 90 percent of my work is now focused on two groups: To keep reading, click here: Why I’m Retiring My ‘Evil HR Lady’ Brand After 18 Years–and What’s Next The post Why I’m Retiring My ‘Evil HR Lady’ Brand After 18 Years–and What’s Next appeared first on Improve Your HR. Go to Source 11/09/2024 - 16:19 /Evil HR Lady Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed NIMH's final 75th Anniversary symposium brings together trailblazers in the scientific community to discuss diverse and visionary perspectives on the future of mental health research. Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:04 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed This webinar brings together experts in areas that include passive and active data collection methods, the measurement of social contexts related to suicide risk, and the methodological aspects of Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI). Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:03 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed This is the third roundtable of NIH's Women's Health Roundtable Series, which focuses on important women's health topics, such as maternal mental health, as part of the White House Women's Health Research Initiative. The roundtable is also featured in NIMH's Office of Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity Webinar Series, which focuses on mental health equity research topics. Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:03 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed This webinar focuses on the complex communication between the nervous and immune systems and how this interaction impacts brain function during development, adulthood, and disease. Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:03 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire A new rule says mental health and substance use disorder care on private insurance plans should be covered at the same level as physical health benefits. Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire How to cope with feelings of anxiety, fear, and helplessness, is something every parent approaches differently. Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire There are benefits to sleeping with a cooling blanket. Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

PsycPORT™: Psychology Newswire Parents who are 'helicoptering' over their college-age kids are doing them a 'disservice.' Go to Source 10/09/2024 - 06:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom