UNC embraces AI as popularity grows: ‘Remarkable’ – ABC11 Raleigh-Durham

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (WTVD) — No matter what generation you step onto the UNC campus, the spirit of academia is true. However, faculty and student approaches to age-old questions have changed dramatically with the evolution of artificial intelligence, which plays an important role in everyday functions.

“The thing that comes across first about AI is how excited and enthusiastic everyone is,” said Dr. Michael Barker, vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer at UNC.

“I’ve been really encouraged by the number of different types of projects that people have ideas for and just the energy that seems to emerge around it,” added Dr. Andy Lang, UNC’s associate dean for IT and data analytics.

Chancellor Lee Roberts, who discussed AI in remarks at his installation ceremony earlier this month, noted its role in a “fast-moving world”.

An August report by the Digital Educational Council found that 86% of students surveyed use AI regularly in their learning.

“Students are definitely using it,” said Mark McNeely, professor of the practice of marketing.

McNeely incorporates artificial intelligence into his classes, even teaching a course on artificial intelligence entrepreneurship.

“There is something of a saying in the AI ​​world that you will not be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by someone who knows AI. That’s why it’s so important for students to have AI skills and for educators to have the skills to deliver to students,” McNeely said.

Analysis of job postings by PricewaterhouseCoopers found a threefold increase in hiring for positions that require specialized AI skills and a 25% potential premium to the average salary for those positions.

“We really need to make sure our students have the skills they need to compete in the marketplace. We know from the data that recruiters are looking for students with AI skills, so we need to make sure we have the ability to give them those skills,” McNeely said.

UNC has created an Artificial Intelligence Generation Committee and an Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Program, tasking officials with a series of tasks and responsibilities when it comes to incorporating artificial intelligence.

“The fact that it was so active, so fast, and engaged the minds of so many people is truly remarkable. But it’s still early. Part of what the programs do is cast a wide net so we can actually get the expertise, the advice of a wider group of people who are thinking about it, considering what the appropriate uses are, where you can get the small gains, where you can have greater opportunities,” Barker said.

In the Artificial Intelligence Committee, goals include making recommendations to the Chancellor for grant and project funding for faculty, staff, students and campus units and increasing their use. In the AI ​​Accelerator Program, the focus is on providing incentives, including grants and matching funds, to promote its adoption as part of instruction, research, and other uses.

“I think one of the drivers has to do with democratizing access to AI,” Lang said.

Its capabilities include things like writing code and streamlining research, with AI seen as a key tool to help further medical progress.

“Historically in the field of drug discovery, where we may have used traditional methods to test hundreds, if not thousands, of compounds in a laboratory, it would take years to identify drugs that could be used to treat new illnesses or diseases. With AI, we can now limit the number of targets that must enter the lab. Instead of testing hundreds or thousands in the lab, we can test dozens and that speeds up the process of identifying new drugs to treat diseases.

Lang also noted its application in the humanities.

“One project that he has that I’ve talked to someone about has to do with the corpus of documents created by St. Thomas Aquinas and getting an AI to look at that work and maybe bring things to the surface that weren’t discovered before. there are also intersections with philosophy and so on,” Lang said.

Among all this, part of the Committee’s focus is on establishing guidelines for when it is appropriate to use artificial intelligence, which despite its rapid development still has limitations.

“Part of the role of academia is not just to leverage it as a tool to do research or whatever field, but to do research on AI itself. To make sure that we can understand the models, we can understand how the models are performing, understand the shortcomings of the AI ​​models, and then work to innovate to strengthen them or address them or address those shortcomings, so we can get to the point where he can be trusted,” Johns said.

Even in the tasks it can perform, the ethical debate about its usefulness continues to loom both in and out of college.

“If I’m writing a letter to my daughter, if I’m writing a letter of condolence or something like that, it matters that I write it, not that the machine writes it. So it puts us in a situation where we have to think about what it’s like to interact and be human,” Barker explained.