Generative AI in Education and Research: Recommendations, Early Experiences and Next Steps - An Ed Tech Day Featured Session

By Andrew Hogan, March 3, 2024

Dr. Kavita Bala, computer scientist, entrepreneur and inaugural Dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science will be leading a discussion titled, "Generative AI in Education and Research: Recommendations, Early Experiences and Next Steps" at 1 PM on Thursday, March 21st, in the Klingenstein Lounge.

Since ChatGPT was released for public use in late 2022, there has been immense interest, speculation, and trepidation about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies and their impact on society. The term “Generative AI” refers to a range of AI techniques including text-based variants like GPT-4, Bart, Gemini, used in search and chatbots, and image generation technologies like Dall-E and MidJourney. There is excitement about the immense opportunity that GenAI presents for personalized learning and training, but these technologies have raised concerns about use by students to circumvent learning in violation of academic integrity policies. In administration and research, GenAI promises to automate mundane tasks, increase efficiency, and provide better service to stakeholders. But accuracy, bias, and privacy concerns complicate the near-term use of GenAI.

In this talk, Dr. Bala will describe the opportunities and concerns with the use of GenAI technologies in universities and describe Cornell's thinking on the deployment of GenAI in education, pedagogy, research, and administration. Dr. Bala will describe Cornell's early experiences using it over the past year and outline next steps for the future.

This session is among the 40+ scheduled presentations for the 30th Educational Technology Day at Ithaca College, taking place on Thursday, March 21st, from 9 am to 3 pm in the Campus Center. Registration is not necessary for Ithaca College Community members. For further details, please visit the Ed Tech Day website at www.ithaca.edu/edtechday.

Please watch Intercom for additional announcements about ways in which you can be part of the day, and for details on many of the seminars and other featured events.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact the Information Technology and Analytics Ed Tech Day team at edtechday@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.

Notes on the Presenter:

Kavita Bala, computer scientist, entrepreneur is the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She received a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) from the Indian Institute of Technology, and a Masters of Science (S.M.) and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to her dean appointment she was chair of Cornell's Department of Computer Science.

Bala's research expertise is in computer graphics and computer vision and she has made fundamental contributions to the fields. Her current research in computer vision is in visual recognition and discovery in satellite images, and recognition of styles and attributes in images. Her early research focused on realistic, physically-based rendering and includes seminal work on scalable rendering, as well as deep contributions to modeling of textiles.

In addition to numerous teaching awards and publishing a graduate textbook, she has received a variety of awards and accolades including the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2019) and Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020).