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Technology Conversations − EP. 21 − AI² Center

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Welcome to our podcast, Technology Conversations, where we discuss technology-related topics, from how to find resources for your technology needs to how technology can impact our lives. This is Anchalee Phataralaoha and I am your host. Today, we’re going to learn about AI² Center from Dr. Hans van Oostrom. Welcome!

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Thank you for having me.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Thank you for being here. And to start off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what brought you to your current role?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Oh great! That’s a long story, but I’ll do a short version. I was originally born in the Netherlands, and I did most of my studies there. I came to the University of Florida 38 years ago to study for my master’s thesis, and I never ended up leaving. I did a PhD as well. And so, my career spans, sort of, biomedical engineering as my discipline and ultimately engineering education. And so, I started a new department at UF, the department of Engineering Education, and I was the chair for six years. And then I kind of stepped down and stepped into the role of director of the AI² Center. So, I’m the second director of the center, and I’ve been doing that for about a year and a half now.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: And what does your day-to-day look like, and also your primary responsibilities?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yeah, so I oversee the center, which is really a center with me as a faculty member and nine staff, and we now have a provost fellow, another faculty member helping. And so, my role is really to oversee all the programs that the center is responsible for and making sure they run, and we have activities, we have everything scheduled. We’re oftentimes in need of faculty as well to help with training. So, a lot of our focus is training faculty in the use of AI in their classes, and the ultimate goal is to teach all of our students something about AI. So, we’re starting with the faculty, and so sometimes we also get other faculty involved to help us with the training sessions. And so, day-to-day, every day is kind of different, it’s not the same, so it depends on what’s going on: if we have training going on, if we have a room full of faculty, if we have visitors from other universities. So, we do a lot of different things.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: You said you have several programs. Can you give us maybe a few examples of the programs that you offer?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yeah, so, the main focus is to train faculty so that faculty can be aware of AI and how to use it properly in their classes. And we really focus on what we call AI Across the Curriculum, and that means that we have to train faculty from all the disciplines. You know, obviously, engineering and computer science, they know a lot about AI. But it’s really powerful for faculty from other disciplines, say history or languages or humanities, to know more about AI so they can integrate it in their classes, because our ultimate goal is to train students. And so, we start with train the trainer, teach the teacher. And that’s our big focus, and so have various training programs. Our big one is in-person training for faculty. It’s a four-day training, so four days in-person, four days in a row. And we do that typically between the semesters when there’s a break, and it fills up every time.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So that training is ongoing?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yes.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: I suppose so that new faculty coming in, they’ve got training as well?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yes, and we’ve also just launched what we call AI Adventure, which is the same training, the same micro-credential for AI in teaching and learning, but in an online format. And so, we just launched the full series of that this fall semester, and you can enroll in that as a UF faculty member. There’re three courses. One is AI fundamentals. We feel the foundations are very important; you need to understand what the foundations of AI are before you can really use it appropriately, because you’ve got to understand what is a model, what goes in it, how is it trying to give you an answer. So you can interpret the answer appropriately. And then the second part is AI Ethics, how to appropriately use AI, what are the ethical considerations you need to figure out. And then the third part is application. And for our students, it’s application to the discipline, but for the faculty it’s application to teaching and learning: how would you use it in teaching and learning? And so, there’re three courses in the AI Adventure, and if you do all three parts, then you get a micro-credential.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: And does it replace those four-day trainings you mentioned?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: It does replace it in a way, but we’re still continuing it, too, so it just provides more capacity for more people to do it. And for a lot of faculty, taking four days during their break is not a great way to spend their break, right, so they rather work on it every day ongoing during the semester.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: On their own time.

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: And so, we feel that this is another format of the same training. What you kind of miss is when we put 35 people together in a room from different disciplines, and they start talking and they start having ideas of what they can do and how they can apply AI in their classes. New ideas come about, and new relationships, you know, new connections. So, it is missing that in the online version. So, I think the in-person version is still better, but it’s still very good to learn AI in the online version as well.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So, these programs, they are not a requirement for faculty? How does it work? Or for anyone interested, they would come and take the training?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yeah, yeah, there’s no requirement currently. I mean I don’t know if we’ll ever get there for faculty. I think we’re talking about some staff training too, but we don’t do a lot of staff training. But I think it’s important for all faculty to do this, and to have at least a base understanding, because I think oftentimes there’s a lot of misconceptions about AI and, you know, education is power, right? So, the more you learn, the better you can actually give your opinion or use it or not use it or make decisions.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So do you think—what percentage of people who have taken or been part of this AI training? Ballpark, maybe the majority?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: I think—How many people have we trained? Is that what you’re asking ultimately?

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Or like percentage. Let’s say percentagewise.

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yeah, it’s hard to say because we train people from various groups, and so I don’t have a clear percentage. I know that over the years, we’ve trained 2,800 people, faculty, but that includes faculty from other institutions. And so, obviously, I mean, the total faculty at the university is like 6,600, so we don’t really make a big dent, right? And so, I think the online version that we just launched is going to help with that. Yeah, so, what has happened is with our AI Across the Curriculum, training faculty who then teach courses and then students take those courses, so that whole process has been a great way to roll out AI across the university. And so, we call ourselves an AI university and we serve as a model to the nation, so Chris Malachowsky, who was co-founder of NVIDIA, we all know, he’s our friend, he’s going around all these states and says: universities should follow the model that the University of Florida has proposed. And so, if universities want to know about that and learn about that, we have monthly visits. So, we set aside a day and a half every month for people to come in, fly in. We have an hour and a half program that includes both the academic piece and it includes the technical piece: How do you build a data center? How do you operate a data center? A tour to HiPerGator. And so, that program is pretty popular, so we do it every month. And so, we have people from all over the nation coming to us for that kind of training.  

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So, I heard you mentioned AI Across Curriculum. So, the whole idea is: faculty receive training and then they go back to their department or college and then build courses with AI as part of it.

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yes

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So, those courses, are they requirements or electives for students?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: So, we have over 200 courses and most of those are elective courses. So, they’re usually upper division, mostly undergraduate courses, there are some grad courses too but mostly undergraduate courses, and they’re upper division, so junior, you know, senior year. And they count as electives to the programs. There is one exception: the College of Business has nine majors and for all nine, they’ve now required an AI course. There is now currently one required, it’s a data analytics course, and they’re actually working on requiring a second one. And if I look at the number of students who are taking AI courses, the College of Business has been the winner for the last two years. Because they’re a big college, one, and then, two, they require a course. Every one of their students takes a course. And you could argue that in order to run a business, you really need to know about AI, because it’s really important.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Right. It is everywhere now. 

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: It is. I think that’s part of their reasoning. I think some of the other departments and programs will also require some. Some have it more embedded into their courses, maybe not calling it an AI course, but I think it’s more and more important. And so, we are encouraging that. That’s part of what we do as a enter, is to help them with incorporating AI in their courses in an appropriate way.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So, I’m sure you have a lot of resources for teaching and learning. And in that case, how best for people to reach out to you if you have questions or have an interest in AI?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yeah, so I think the main thing is our website. So, ai.ufl.edu, very easy to remember. And that’s actually the University of Florida’s website, but there is a teaching and learning section on that website, and it has a lot of the information that I just talked about and more, even, because there’re other things. And through there you can contact us. So, we have a generic email, which is ai@ufl.edu, so, also very simple. And we have a marketing team that looks at those and we have different staff members with different responsibilities. Like, I have an educational specialist, I have an instructional designer, a project manager, and so different titles, different responsibilities. And so, if you email the generic email address, then it gets redirected to the right persons.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Any final thoughts you would like to share?

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: Yeah, I think one, the notion AI is everywhere, right? AI is absolutely everywhere, and I think ignoring it is not going to be good. So, it’s not going to go away.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: It’s here to stay, yeah.

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: It’s here to stay, it’s not going to go away, so you might as well learn something about it. So, if you don’t feel comfortable with using AI, or you have never used AI, or you’re very limited in using AI, get some training. Training is available in many places. You know, actually, UFIT and CITT is providing a lot of training. We provide some training. It depends sort of on the topic area, but education is power. I think that’s sort of my final thought. Learn about it so that you can make an informed decision whether you want to use it for this or not. And I think a lot of decisions currently are being made without that kind of knowledge.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Thank you very much, Dr. Hans, for being here.

Dr. Hans van Oostrom: You’re welcome!

Anchalee Phataralaoha: And that’s it everyone. We will see you next time for a topic of interest in IT.