It’s time for Tech Briefs, Cardinal News’ weekly batch of items covering the digital and life sciences landscapes. We go live on Wednesdays.
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AI use strong in Virginia, with Montgomery County at No. 5 statewide
Virginia is No. 4 nationwide for artificial intelligence adoption, with Lexington, Montgomery County, Radford and Lynchburg in the commonwealth’s top 10 localities using the technology.
Those numbers come from Microsoft, whose AI Economy Institute late last week released a document set called United States AI Diffusion: AI Adoption Across the Nation. The top line shows that 31.3% of Americans ages 18-64 have used AI tools, with more in metropolitan areas (32.9%) than in rural ones (16.2%).
Nationally, Maryland is first among states, at 36.3%, and Williamsburg is atop the list of localities, with 73.2% of working-age adults using AI there. Harrisonburg, Lexington, Charlottesville and Montgomery County fill out the state’s top 5, each with more than 50% adoption. Radford and Lynchburg rank seventh and eighth, respectively, both in the 48% range.
It’s not just coincidental that each of those localities is home to at least one higher education institution. The executive summary cites Williamsburg as an example.
“As a small city with a highly concentrated student population at the College of William and Mary, it also has one of the nation’s highest proportions of residents ages 18 to 24,” according to the report. “This points to a broader trend: younger Americans are adopting AI at higher rates than older age groups, even after accounting for differences between urban and rural counties.”
Their uses aren’t relegated to schoolwork. “Surveys show that adults under 30 use AI for a wide range of tasks, including information search, brainstorming, work, email writing, image generation, and entertainment,” the document read.
The study, dated May 27, did not account for all the boos that tech bigwigs received this spring while telling commencement audiences that, in essence, AI drinks your milkshake.
Salem’s rate of 42% placed it 14th among the 133 Virginia localities the survey measured. Roanoke (36.1%) is 28th. Bristol sits in 35th, with 34.3%. Alleghany County (31.6%) and Covington (31.2%) are 43rd and 45th, respectively. Danville (30.5%) was No. 48.
West of Montgomery County, Giles, Pulaski, Floyd, Tazewell, Smyth, Washington, Scott and Wise counties were in the 20% to 30% range — most closer to 20% AI adoption.
The researchers grouped localities into three types based on U.S. Department of Agriculture methodology. Metropolitan areas, including cities and surrounding communities, have an urban core of at least 50,000 residents. Micropolitan areas and cities of 5,000 to 50,000 that are their surrounding communities’ economic centers. Rural areas, outside both metropolitan and micropolitan areas, are more remote and relatively small in population.
While about twice as many urban area residents as rural ones use AI tools, the micropolitans fall between them, with 21.8% adoption.
“These differences likely reflect several factors that often reinforce one another, including variation in digital infrastructure; the concentration of information, management, finance jobs and young-adult populations in metropolitan areas; and differing levels of trust in AI,” according to the report.
Overall, the United States outpaces the rest of the planet, whose adoption rate among the 18-64 range is less than 18%.
According to the Microsoft document, researchers derived the numbers “from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry” that they adjusted to reflect differences in operating systems “and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population.”
See maps and graphs. See the technical report.
Virginia Tech professor gets money to study virtual reality’s influence on human behavior
The National Science Foundation has granted a Virginia Tech computer science professor a five-year award to study the behavioral influence possible within virtual reality, with an eye toward providing ways to identify and intercept such methods, according to a university news release.
Brendan David-John, an assistant professor who runs the university’s Private Eye Lab, was among the winners of the foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program award, or CAREER award, given to about 500 principal investigators annually.
The award is $672,132, according to the Virginia Tech computer science department. It is meant to support early-career faculty with potential as academic role models in research and education and who could lead the way in breakthroughs, according to the National Science Foundation website.
David-John, whose specialties include eye tracking, virtual reality, augmented reality and privacy, has studied people’s interactions with virtual and augmented reality systems, particularly the ones whose eye-gaze data collection can pose such privacy concerns as user identification and behaviors. In his new work, he’ll look to learn how such immersive environment features as visual cues, room layouts, advertisements and design elements influence decision-making, according to the news release.
“I think one of the ethical questions I hope to answer is, where is the line between nudging and manipulation?” David-John said in the news release. “Some personalization is good. People like personalization. But at a certain point, where is it going against my own best interests? And how do you define that line?”
Educational outreach is a funding component, and David-John’s plans include using it to support student researchers, hackathons, workshops and travel scholarships that will bring students to Virginia Tech to explore virtual reality, privacy and ethical design.
“The students who use these technologies are often some of the most informed about them,” David-John said. “We want to bring them into the conversation early.”
