CONTACT:
Jeanan Yasiri Moe
Director of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs
[email protected] | (608) 960-9892
Get ready to unleash your creative AI powers in the first-ever UW-Madison MadPrompts Battle! On November 29, from 6 to 8 p.m., WARF and the UW-Madison Data Science Institute are hosting an electrifying competition at the Discovery Building that invites UW-Madison students, faculty and staff to use text prompts to create unique, funny or otherwise winning AI-generated images.
MadPrompts will follow a competitive game show format, in which five contestants, sitting in the center of the room with their screens facing out, receive a meta prompt in the form of a snippet of text. Using the prompt, they’ll feed a string of words into text-to-image Generative AI software, like OpenAI’s Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, to create original photos, images or illustrations. The catch? They’ve got to impress with their originality, humor and more.
The event is free and open to the public, and the audience gets to join the fun too – you can move around the room and participate in voting via a mobile app.
Expert judges, including a Computer Sciences department instructor, a WARF representative and a faculty member, will provide lively commentary, and their votes will combine with the audience’s to determine the ultimate winner. As the competition heats up, contestants will be eliminated one by one, and the top three will grab some awesome cash prizes!
“We’re hoping to engage the entire UW campus by bringing together anyone at the university who uses AI in various capacities,” says Lesli Mark, WARF Accelerator Associate. “Generative AI is accessible to everyone, and because it’s such a broad reaching technology, there are more people using AI on campus than we know of. We want to know who’s interested in working with those technologies and who’s using AI as a creative solution to speed up a pain point in their process.”
Mark has been collaborating with Kyle Cranmer, the David R. Anderson Director of the Data Science Institute, to plan the event. Cranmer is in charge of IT for the competition.
“Generative AI has captured the attention of the world, and this is a fun event that can also serve as a launch pad for more serious discussions about the impact of these emerging technologies,” says Cranmer.
“Kyle has a lot of fun, cool ideas related to this event,” adds Mark. “There have been a series of speaker talks on AI on campus this fall, so our team at WARF is eager to learn more about AI and what opportunities it presents, as well as build on our collaboration with the Data Science Institute. We think this is the first prompt battle of its style at a U.S. university, and we hope UW folks participate as contestants.”
Join us in the AI revolution! MadPrompts isn’t just a battle; it’s a catalyst for broader discussion and collaborative innovation. We’re eager to see the creativity that the UW-Madison community will bring to the table.
Learn more and RSVP to attend the event here.
Apply to be a MadPrompts contestant by October 31 here.
About WARF
Incorporated as a nonprofit foundation in 1925, WARF has a founding purpose “to promote, encourage, and aid scientific investigation and research at and within the University of Wisconsin-Madison.” Over 98 years the foundation has funded more than $4.4 billion in cumulative research grants to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research (adjusted for inflation), has been issued more than 4,200 patents (with 2,200 active patents), generates an additional 375 invention disclosures and 55 revenue-generating licenses each year, and has helped create 190 startup companies based on UW-Madison technologies. For more information, visit warf.org and watch a video about how WARF stewards the Cycle of Innovation.
About the Data Science Institute
The UW-Madison Data Science Institute (DSI) is central to UW-Madison’s strategic priority to grow its research enterprise and expand its global impact, supporting the scholarship of faculty, staff, and students. It was established in 2019 with a generous endowment gift from American Family Insurance. The DSI performs cutting-edge research in the fundamentals of data science and catalyzes the translation of this research into practice, to advance scientific discovery in collaboration with researchers across campus and beyond.
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