Campus Technology Insider Podcast July 2023
Listen: Educating the Next Generation in AI
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
What skills will students need for the workforce of the future in an age dominated by artificial intelligence? In addition to basic computer science, data competencies, and the mathematics and statistics behind AI and machine learning, there are a range of social impacts to consider: AI risk, ethics, privacy, questions of bias, etc. All of the above are part of the curriculum at Dakota State University, a STEM-oriented institution with a focus on computer science, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with DSU President José-Marie Griffiths about how her institution is preparing students for careers in AI. In addition to her experience in research, teaching, and higher education administration, Griffiths was a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, part of the 2019 John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act. She has also served in presidential appointments to the National Science Board, the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, and the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. Here's our chat.
One of the things that often comes up in conversations about AI is how students will need a new set of these skills to succeed in the world of work. So I wanted to ask how you see workforce skills changing in the face of these new technology developments.
01:54
José-Marie Griffiths: Well, clearly they are in the process of changing, but they've also been in the process of changing for quite some time. Just to give you a little bit of background on Dakota State, we're really a special-focus STEM institution, where our special focus is computer science, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, those areas. Now we teach in other areas, too, don't get me wrong, but this is a special focus and we put a lot of our efforts into that. And we have about 3,300 students, from associate degrees through to doctoral degrees. So why AI, right? That's the question. Well, AI has actually been around for decades. I know because it was around before I was. And there have been recent developments in AI that, and the facilitating technologies for AI, that have really brought AI to the forefront, particularly in the minds of the general public. And if we look at the headlines that have been in just about every media outlet recently, we know everybody's talking about AI, which is, which is probably good. But DSU, we hired our first professor in artificial intelligence in 2016. And we developed two undergraduate degrees in artificial intelligence. So we have a Bachelor of Science in artificial intelligence, which is aligned with our computer science and cybersecurity program. And we have a bachelor's degree in, a Bachelor's of Business Administration in artificial intelligence, where you focus on the application of artificial intelligence in different kinds of organizations, whether it be healthcare, or just generally in IT organizations helping to support, you know, finance, etc, etc. So, our students, because they're so focused on technology, and we want to graduate students who are, as we call it, cyber savvy, whatever their discipline, it's important for students to really know and understand how artificial intelligence works, what it is, what it isn't, because people think it's a lot more than it is actually right now, and what it might become. So we think that we have, we're preparing students to learn how algorithms work, how they can reflect bias, intended or unintended, the bias of the creators, how AI algorithms are trained, so some sense that, you know, you have to have data to train them, and that can be brought into the system, how ongoing data are used, so the AI, the artificial intelligence, is learning in an ongoing way. I think that there's an interesting thing that people need to think about the role of the artificial intelligence and the role of the human in the loop, as it were, and how they work together and should do work together, could work together, don't work together, whatever it is. The notions of risk, and then I do think for us, in particular, because of the institution we are, I think there's a very symbiotic relationship between artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. So we need, in cybersecurity, we need artificial intelligence to deal with all the signals we're trying to manage, to try and detect anomalies and people's access to the systems and services and networks that we're running. At the same time, AI needs cybersecurity to protect the data flows, to protect the models and the algorithms. So we see them going together, which is why we got involved very early, 2016, to say we can't keep doing cybersecurity unless we do AI, and we can't keep doing AI unless we keep doing cybersecurity. So we see those two, the working in different directions. Now, in terms of our students, I classify them into three types. There are the students who will be AI developers, and those students are predominantly in our Beacom College of Computing and Cyber Sciences, which is where the technical artificial intelligence degree sits. There are those who are going to apply AI in their jobs, and that could be people like, like our Business and Information Systems, but in our College of Education, they're looking at how to use artificial intelligence in the K-12 environment and also in our Arts and Sciences program. And then we have those who need a general understanding of the capabilities and limited, limitations, risks associated with AI, sort of the kind of thing you'd want your educated population to know about. So we have all three kinds of students on campus, so I break, I break the audience out that way, and we give different things to different students.