Campus Technology Insider Podcast May 2024
Listen: Tapping into AI Across Every Part of the University
Rhea Kelly 00:12
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Touro University has embarked on a system-wide initiative to incorporate artificial intelligence into all of its programs — not only in teaching and learning, but also across research, operations, and policy. The institution has also created a new academic AI position to serve as a dedicated AI leader, facilitate the use of AI across the university, and cultivate AI thinking in students, faculty, and staff. For this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Dr. Shlomo Argamon, Touro's recently appointed associate provost for AI, about his role, the importance of AI in higher education, how to prepare students for the new world of AI in the workforce, and whether or not AI opponents could be waiting for their time to attack. Here's our chat.
Hi Shlomo, welcome to the podcast.
Shlomo Argamon 01:16
Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.
Rhea Kelly 01:19
So I know that you were recently appointed associate provost for AI at Touro University, and I think it's so interesting that AI is making its way into, you know, higher education roles. So I'd love to hear more about your new role and your interest in AI.
Shlomo Argamon 01:36
Yep, thank you. I also find it fascinating and wonderful that AI is finding its way into higher education as well as all across society, because I've been researching and teaching AI for 30-odd years. I like to say that I've been doing AI since before it was cool. And I've been interested in it simply because I'm interested in understanding the human mind. I've been just fascinated with the way in which computational methods, computer science and so forth, can be, can be used to do things that are intelligent in various ways. And the last five to 10 years have seen a tremendous explosion in the usefulness of these techniques. And that's why it's finding its way everywhere, including into higher education.
Rhea Kelly 02:26
Would you say that AI role, I mean, there's so much focus on generative AI in, you know, as a trend right now, but I'm sure that, that your role encompasses more than just that. So maybe you could talk about how you define AI for your role and sort of what, what is important to know about that?
Shlomo Argamon 02:48
That's great question. I'll first talk about a little bit about my role and the various ways in which I'm looking at integrating and using AI at Touro University, and then how that, what the implications are in terms of, you know, different aspects of AI and so forth. So I view my role as looking at AI, you know, across the university as a whole, in four main areas. One is in education: How do we use AI in education? And also, how do we teach AI? And what should we teach about AI to our students in various fields? It's, it's now the case where all of our students need to know something about AI — AI literacy of some sort. So that's one piece. The second piece is in terms of looking at how do we integrate AI across the research in the university. So helping to facilitate the use of AI in research in, in many areas, because now research in all areas, AI can contribute a tremendous amount. So looking at integrating that across the university. Third is in terms of university operations: How can we use AI to improve our operations? Can we use AI to do marketing more effectively, to improve admissions, to help with budgeting and financial processing, and so forth? What can we do with AI there? And fourth, and which connects to all three of the above, is looking at policy. So what kinds of policies do we need around AI, in terms of security, in terms of what our faculty, staff, and students should or should not be able to do with AI for various reasons. So bringing all of that together. And in addition, there, especially when we think about education, there's a lot more to AI than just machine learning and generative AI and so forth. And there are a lot of conceptual tools that we have developed in AI research over the last 60, 70 years that can be useful to our students as they go out into the world. The notion is to teach our students something about what I would call AI thinking: ways of approaching problems, ways of solving problems that come from the field of AI. Thinking about how to use data to solve problems, ways of thinking about how to structure problems, and how to formulate the problems that you're facing in new ways that can help you to solve them.