Campus Technology Insider Podcast April 2024
Rhea Kelly 08:31
So I understand that you started with kind of an open call for interested faculty and researchers and staff to submit their ideas for leveraging ChatGPT Enterprise. And I'm curious kind of how you evaluated those submissions. You know, what were you looking for?
Lev Gonick 08:48
Right, so actually, we have completed one full round of challenge grants. What we chose to do, because, again, this is, you know, there are kind of two ways we thought of designing the engagement when it came to distributing licenses. One was like, okay, maybe one way is just to let a thousand flowers bloom and see what happens: We just give licenses to everybody and then we see what happens. I'm a student of, of technology adoption, that's kind of what my actually academic interests are in. And it turns out that there's actually a fairly predictable curve, which is, you know, just generally, a case where there's a lot of enthusiasm early on, there is a valley of, in some ways a valley of despair, things, you know, there's a tail in terms of people using it and then using it consistently, and then, you know, if it works, there's some kind of a plateau. In order to avoid the like, let's just give everybody a license and see what happens, we decided to actually frame what we called impact areas — areas where we were looking to have impact — and then called on the campus community, the staff, the faculty, I'll say a word about the students in a second, the faculty and the staff to actually respond to creative ways in which they could advance their research or their service roles at the university by leveraging those, those licenses to those effect. And what I've done here with my team is we've actually created a, I think first in the nation, but certainly of consequence to us here at ASU, we've developed a dedicated AI acceleration team. So all grant recipients not only got the licenses, they also have internal consulting services, technical, UI/UX, data science, all kinds of, again, important attributes. Because again, this is a case where this is not about hitting a button. This is really what we would simply call a data wrangling challenge, that you need to have, you need to have experts to support certainly areas where you're trying to have more than just a kind of, you know, one-evening experiment in kind of a parlor, a set of parlor tricks that you can do with your ChatGPT. That's sort of certainly been the way that we've done it. And we had nearly 200 great ideas come forward, we supported in that first go-around over, well over 100 of them. Those are underway, we started that, we announced on January the 18th, we released the internal grant on February, challenge grant on February 1, we closed the February 9, we reviewed and got back to folks, and again, here we are less, just about 30 days into the process. And you know, all kinds of great stories. In fact, there's a story that just got released yesterday about work that's going on with one of the recipients of the grant in his English composition class, already all kinds of exciting insights for him and his students that we're sharing more broadly across the campus. And then next week, our second challenge, which happens next week, again, about a two-and-a-half-week turnaround proposal will tee up a whole bunch of new projects. And this time, in addition to our staff and faculty attending to challenge areas, we're inviting all of our students who are interested to also submit either together, together with their research faculty colleagues, or their teachers, or their staff colleagues, responses as well. And that should take us into basically the beginning of the fall semester where we'll have all kinds of new exciting things to share, which I can't share with you just yet.
Rhea Kelly 12:26
It sounds like speed is really important in, you know, because the technology keeps changing. And so you have to get through the proposals and the evaluations and the approvals pretty quickly, or risk, you know, that, things changing before you get a chance to start those projects.