Bay Area professors are offering more courses on artificial intelligence and its impact on multiple disciplines, while using it to help teach classes and answer students’ questions. A UC Berkeley professor encourages students to use a chatbot to solve programming problems.
Jessica Christian/The ChronicleArtificial Intelligence is poised to rapidly change everything from the way we drive to the way we live, work and play. And in the Gulf region, where the emerging industry is largely based, it is already changing how and what universities teach.
Professors at schools across the region said they are increasingly using AI to solve class assignments and administrative hurdles while making technology familiarity a requirement for their students. Students in all types of majors — not just technical fields — are showing greater interest in how AI will impact their chosen field of study, they said.
From Stanford University to UC Berkeley, and from San Francisco State to San Jose State, students studying law, philosophy, medicine and other fields are drawn to studying artificial intelligence and its impact on their subjects. In response, schools are offering new lessons on how to integrate technology into everything from accounting to filmmaking to ethics.
advertisement
Article continues below this ad
San Francisco State computer science professor Dragutin Petkovic has offered a certificate in Ethical and Explainable AI since 2019, taught alongside courses in philosophy and business. He said the launch of ChatGPT last year and the surge in interest in generative software that can apparently write and generate images has changed who takes his class — and what is discussed.
“There’s a lot more interest than last year,” Petkovich said, adding that the class was about half computer science students last semester, while the other half was a mix of philosophy students and students in other majors. “This year I have a lawyer, a defector from Iran, and a former OpenAI employee,” among others, he said.
Even his software engineering courses, which challenge students to come up with and code different types of applications, have incorporated generative software for writing and editing code, Petkovich said. He allows his students to use technology to help write their programs, but asks them to write research papers about the experiment and its relative benefits versus traditional methods.
One of Petkovic’s students, John Congqiu, used an AI tool called GitHub copilot to help program his final project, having used AI programs in the past to work on software projects. “I use him as a friend,” Kongqiu said. He said it’s especially useful for canceling time-consuming tasks more quickly, and for editing code he’s already written.
San Francisco State University has launched classes on the ethics of artificial intelligence and the use of artificial intelligence and other technologies in fields as diverse as accounting and filmmaking.
Chase DeFeliciantonioBrandon Watanabe, one of Petkovic’s students, said he sometimes drops a piece of unfamiliar code into the AI engine and asks what its purpose is, and gets a written response in fluent English instead of having to decipher it himself or pass a message across online boards.
advertisement
Article continues below this ad
When the AI certificate was first offered four years ago, “the problem was completely new,” said Carlos Montemayor, a University of San Francisco professor who teaches in the philosophy department and has just published a book he also uses in his course called “Prospects for Humanistic Artificial Intelligence.”
“The majority of the students I had four years ago were a little more isolated,” Montemayor said. He now teaches philosophy students interested in artificial intelligence — as well as computer science students interested in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, among others.
“Students (know) that if they don’t understand it at all, they will fall behind,” he added.
San Francisco State also offered courses this school year that it did not offer the previous year. Among those courses were lessons on the use of artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and automation in accounting, and another called Filmmaking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Stanford has also added courses, including a course on medical applications of generative AI programs such as ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator, in which students demonstrate and brainstorm applications of technology in the field with peers and faculty.
advertisement
Article continues below this ad
New and different course offerings and increased interest in them are not the only changes brought about by technology at the university level.
Narges Norouzi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began encouraging her computer science students this fall to leverage OpenAI’s GPT-4, albeit in a limited way, to solve complex programming challenges. AI-generated coding hints can help them overcome difficult problems and get faster results.
Norouzi said the effort is still in the testing phase, especially in an intro to programming class, and does not give students access to the full chatbot. Instead, the software I designed using the technology allows students to click a button that prompts GPT-4 for a hint based on the material they are working on and, increasingly, what the software knows about the learning styles of the class and students.
The students were critical of the programming hints, which Norouzi said will be incorporated into future versions of the tool through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback. Over time, he will be able to understand how students learn and provide increasingly better prompts.
advertisement
Article continues below this ad
Another program still in the testing phase that Norouzi hopes to integrate into classrooms next year will feed GPT-4 with information from course texts and an online question-and-answer portal for students called Edison. The goal is for the program to learn from that material and be able to quickly answer many of the thousands of questions students ask it each semester.
One data course has nearly 1,300 students, and teacher assistants can shoulder a heavy load of answering every question Edison comes up with, Norouzi said.
“We worked on how to give (the model) the right context,” Norouzi said. This means training him to know whether to refer to the course text, homework description, or syllabus to see if a question has already been asked and answered.
She said a related tool she plans to make available to students next semester can perform similar contextual queries for course materials, but with a focus on shortening the long waits that can arise when students sign up for one-on-one office hours with professors.
“The queues last up to four hours,” Norouzi said. So she created a GPT-4-based chatbot familiar with the course material that students could talk to and, hopefully, solve their problem without having to wait in line.
advertisement
Article continues below this ad
“We hope this will help us move faster on the waiting list and help serve more students,” especially in larger courses, she said.
Stanford University has added a course on medical applications of generative AI programs such as ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator, in which students present and brainstorm applications of the technology in medicine to peers and faculty.
Jessica Christian/The ChronicleSan Jose State professor Ahmed Banafa has made familiarity with artificial intelligence a graduation requirement for his courses.
“The moment ChatGPT came out… I immediately knew this was different,” said Banafa, who teaches classes on computer networking, operating systems, cybersecurity and other topics.
Banafa said that since launching ChatGPT, he has asked for undergraduate capstone projects and the work of the master’s degree students he supervises to contain an AI component, whether that’s a chatbot to interact with a student-created app or some other type of integration with OpenAI programming.
“I realized that my students should have something to talk about in interviews with companies, and be able to talk about artificial intelligence,” Banafa said.
San Francisco. One of Petkovich’s students, Cleveland Ploncie, a State student, said he already uses generative AI in his internship and expects to continue using it in his career. He points out that he is required to document when he uses AI to process code.
Universities, especially public universities, also have a broader role in analyzing what it means that AI is likely to be here to stay, beyond simply integrating the technology into a range of classrooms.
“There is a larger debate that is just beginning,” said Montemayor, the philosophy professor. He said that while some believe AI should be integrated into all aspects of life, others are concerned about its potential to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few executives and large corporations and its potential impact on the environment and the workforce of the future. .
“Most of the people I saw talking at Stanford (about AI) work at Google or are very close to Silicon Valley,” Montemayor said, and tend to be the dominant voice in the AI industry.
“The voices of public institutions really need to be seen as a way to balance” those two aspects, he said.
Reach Chase DiFeliciantonio: chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice
Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the way education is delivered and experienced on college campuses in the Bay Area. From personalized learning platforms to AI-powered tutoring, the influence of this cutting-edge technology is becoming increasingly evident in higher education. Colleges and universities are incorporating AI into their courses and curriculum to better meet the needs of their students, and as a result, the landscape of higher education in the Bay Area is rapidly evolving. In this article, we will explore the ways in which AI is already reshaping campuses and college courses in the Bay Area and how it is enhancing the overall educational experience for students.