Campus Technology Insider Podcast June 2024
Rhea Kelly 18:17
Can you lay out kind of what the foundational skills for AI are, the most important, you know, job-ready skills for students right now?
Antonio Delgado 18:28
So, yeah, the way that we structure our programs, basically, let's start from the beginning. We call it a certificate in Artificial Intelligence Awareness. You want to be aware of what's happening. You want to understand how this is evolving so fast. And this is probably the most popular, because everyone is interested in, hey, this is affecting me or my role. How can I upskill? So that certificate, we have, for example, the AI Foundations course, just to understand what artificial intelligence is. And we always map that class with Ethics on AI. So ethics is essential, is, artificial intelligence is having a huge impact on people, society, everything, humanity at large. So the ethical implication of the usage of AI is essential for us. That is not an afterthought at the end of the program, is at the beginning, first class is AI Introduction and Ethics and AI. So that's the foundation that we start with to then go into what is the application of AI in the specific field that you are studying, or you want to work in the future, or that you're already working and you want to understand, for example, AI in finance, or AI in biology, or AI in math. Like there are so many applications that we created a perspective, or different set of classes that you can learn AI applied to the specific area of your interest. That's an awareness perspective, where you get an understanding and a basic foundation, that at least you feel like, okay, I understand now what's happening. But if you want to go deeper, if you really want to start working with AI, we have what we call a certificate in AI Practitioner. You're becoming a practitioner when you start learning about machine learning foundations, computer vision, and natural language processing as the foundation of how to start, you know, becoming a practitioner of AI. And that's when you're already playing with models and learning with, learning models from, you know, AI, and you start creating solutions, and you start working in projects. That's still foundation level, but more, you know, technical and more specific with requirements. For example, that one does require certain level of programming that we do, that we do with Python, it requires certain level of math, that we level at least with college algebra. So there is a foundation that start having more requirements, but it's to definitely become more technical. And then it has the layer that we add with the bachelor, and that's, again, the first bachelor in the state of Florida, where you start actually going deeper into more advanced topics, where you add simulation, automation, the visualization, the components, the generative AI, with LLMs, large language models. So we start going deeper into the more advanced development of AI solutions, and you are able to graduate in this, from this program in a way that you are capable of doing already. You might not be an AI engineer, but you are the closest to an AI engineer for those roles of the future that we're going to see exploding now in the near future, as machine learning specialists, artificial intelligence technician, those that understand already AI, and, and that can apply AI, and that can either, either get a job on AI or develop their own company. Which we already seen this on the first year of the program, many students come in with a startup ideas just based on the projects that they're working on the classroom. And that's the beauty of AI, that it really allows to create pathways to create new products, new businesses, and new companies automatically based on the expertise that you're getting from, from this program.
Rhea Kelly 22:22
That's a really interesting connection to entrepreneurship. So another thing I wanted to ask about was Miami Dade's AI centers on campus. Could you kind of describe what those are and kind of what and who they're for?