AI in Academia: Navigating the Future Professor Noah Giansiracusa and Gaurav Shah

Jennifer Xu, professor of Computer Information Systems at Bentley University, discusses how to teach AI to business students, the intellectual value of learning coding, the data needs of AI versus human brains, and why curiosity and empathy are paramount as we prepare for jobs of the future.

Fred Ledley, professor of Natural & Applied Sciences at Bentley University, discusses how today's AI grew out of the big data methods of computational biology from the past few decades, how AI is changing the way science is taught and researched, how it's paving the way for personalized medicine, what scientific research papers might look like in the future, and what chatbots do better than web search and what web search still offers that chatbots need to improve on.

Chris Beneke, professor of history at Bentley University, discusses how Bentley's university-wide first year seminar class dealt with AI disruptions, what teaching AI and teaching sex ed have in common, how web search is evolving with AI, and how AI is forcing higher ed to confront some challenging questions around its mission and clarify its purpose.

Chase Cicchetti, Lecturer in Finance at Bentley University, discusses what happened when his students created their own class policy on AI, how generative AI sped up his research, how LLMs are poised to impact the finance industry, and what the biggest indicator was that some of his students used ChatGPT to write their essays.

Monica Garfield, Professor and Chair of the Computer Information Systems department at Bentley University, discusses the evolution of AI, low-code/no-code environments, how to prepare students for a rapidly changing workforce, the right way to teach prompt engineering, Bentley's new cross-disciplinary AI major, what other universities should be mindful of when building AI programs, and what research tasks AI is ready to help faculty with.

The head of Bentley's philosophy department, Axel Seeman, chats about the new computer science/philosophy joint major in AI at Bentley, why interdisciplinarity is "bloody hard," what role philosophy plays in AI and in preparing students for a world full of AI, what Descartes would have said about the latest chatbots, and what impact AI is going to have on our social lives and our feelings of loneliness.