Ravi Pendse, the vice president for information technology at the University of Michigan, was the main speaker during the conference at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Friday.
“Generative AI, in my humble opinion, is going to be an incredibly impactful technology of this century,” he said. “It is going to be a force for positive disruption. I sincerely believe that it is going to be, frankly, as transformative as the Internet has been.”
Pendse told the crowd that they must prioritize AI in the classroom, as those who are unfamiliar with how to use it could find themselves falling behind in the workforce or even out of a job.
“...it’s not going to be AI that will take your job away, it is someone who actually knows these tools, someone who knows Gen AI will take your job away,” he said. “So as educators, it is important for us to make sure the amazing students that we get to educate, we get to learn from, that we emphasize to them and make sure that they understand these tools. Make sure they’re familiar with these tools.”
Two members of Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s new artificial intelligence task force were among the crowd at the conference.
“There are issues with the technology, whether it’s ethics, or bias, or potential errors, that one has to be careful about,” said Auburn University professor N. Hari Harayanan, a member of the governor’s task force.
The task force, which is focused on how state government can and should use AI, includes seven of the governor’s cabinet members, four legislators, and two professors: Harayanan, the chair of Auburn’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and Matthew Hudnall, the faculty senate president at the University of Alabama.
“Ultimately, the pitfall to avoid is over-reliance on AI, but be careful about using AI to improve the efficiency and productivity of the offices,” Harayanan said. “But humans should be involved all the time. We are not talking about replacing anybody at all.”
Hudnall, who teaches computer science, said the task force is looking at how AI can save the government money.
“I think we can gain a lot with AI to reduce costs and optimize the services that we have,” he said. “So I think it’s our inherent responsibility to look at ways to utilize it to save cost and optimize resources.”
Carolyn Garrity, associate professor of marketing and chair of the College of Business at the University of Montevallo, said attending the conference was beneficial.
“It’s a very important topic, and we need to consider how we’re going to address it and how we’re going to prepare our students for the future,” she told AL.com.
Pendse explained that the University of Michigan, in collaboration with Open AI and Microsoft, will be making generative AI personal assistants available to each of the college’s 50,000 students.
“So beginning this coming fall at the University of Michigan, when our students come back in fall along with their typical email address that they get, every student is going to have a Personal AI assistant for them,” he said.
The personal AI assistant, U-M GPT, will answer questions about the school. With a focus on privacy, it will be free for students and have accessibility features for people with visual challenges.
“We wanted to make sure that our model supported screen readers, and it does,” he said. “So folks with visual impairments can also use it.”
They are also working on a tool that will help with scholarship applications.
“The prototype is already working. We are hoping to release it to the nation to use just for free, for everybody to use,” he said.
The deployment of a separate proprietary generative AI platform, U-M Maizey, has helped improve grades at the institution and shorten the time professors attend to administrative duties.
“We have many faculty members who have taken Maizey and have let Maizey ingest and index — remember this is a private environment — all of their class lectures, their class notes, it integrates with our learning management system so they can just point to it and overnight it learns everything.”
“And they have redeployed Maizey as a 24/7 tutor for their classes,” he said. “The faculty members are in full control of it; they can deploy it how they want; they can turn it on only at night; this is not to replace tutors or TAs (Teaching Assistants).”
“More importantly, it saved faculty members who deployed it between 10 to 12 hours of office hours every week, and so that they could actually spend more time with students who are dealing with difficulties as opposed to answering mundane questions.”
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