Artificial Intelligence Study Group
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Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda, Minutes & Status (193rd meeting, Feb. 6, 2026)
Agenda and Minutes
- Announcements
- Blackboard's Socratic questioning tool. Let's try it out. Do blackboard.ualr.edu > a specific course > Content tab > Course content > + > create > AI conversation > Socratic Questioning >
- Socratic questioning with general purpose AI chatbots
- We could use DD's recent conference paper to test it.
- Multi-question modification; guiding the questioner
- Future plans
- 2/27/2026: Guest speaker (Ashley B.) and demo: AI in Wolfram|Alpha Pro.
- "Go Fourth Fridays" series:
Friday, Feb 27 at Noon for free pizza and real-world AI insights you can apply immediately.
What You'll Learn:
Josh Jones from Chick-fil-A will demo how he creates and manages
AI agents to manage operations at one of Little Rock's busiest locations (Markham & Chenal)
Marla Johnson shares what LR business leaders told her they wish they knew about AI—from prompting basics to building custom agents
The Details: 📅 Friday, February 27 🕛 Noon - 1:30 PM 📍 Reynolds First Floor Atrium, UA Little Rock
Schedule:
Noon - 12:30: Lunch & networking (FREE PIZZA! 🍕)
12:30 - 1:30: Presentations & open mic for YOUR ideas
Who Should Attend: Whether you're a business owner curious about AI, a student exploring careers, or just want to understand what all the AI hype means for Little Rock—this is for you.
Save Your Spot: 👉 https://forms.gle/YabL14LkwZJzbi5f9
Community members, students, and faculty all welcome. Bring your questions! Bring a friend!
What You'll Learn:
Josh Jones from Chick-fil-A will demo how he creates and manages
AI agents to manage operations at one of Little Rock's busiest locations (Markham & Chenal)
Marla Johnson shares what LR business leaders told her they wish they knew about AI—from prompting basics to building custom agents
The Details: 📅 Friday, February 27 🕛 Noon - 1:30 PM 📍 Reynolds First Floor Atrium, UA Little Rock
Schedule:
Noon - 12:30: Lunch & networking (FREE PIZZA! 🍕)
12:30 - 1:30: Presentations & open mic for YOUR ideas
Who Should Attend: Whether you're a business owner curious about AI, a student exploring careers, or just want to understand what all the AI hype means for Little Rock—this is for you.
Save Your Spot: 👉 https://forms.gle/YabL14LkwZJzbi5f9
Community members, students, and faculty all welcome. Bring your questions! Bring a friend!
Th Feb. 12, 12-1pm.
UA Little Rock/Google Future AI Series
"AI on Campus: A High Level Overview of
Google's Tools for Research &
Operations"Dear Campus Community,
- I know many of you are curious about Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) and would like to know more. To help fill that knowledge gap, Google has partnered with us to do a series of monthly webinars. These webinars will start with the basics but will progress as the year goes on to include demonstrations of use cases, real-time workshopping of problems, and much more.The first of these webinars will be Thursday, February 12, 2026 from 12-1 p.m. (webinar link). They will then continue on the 2nd Thursday of each month. Please think about attending these webinars to learn more about what AI can do as well as what its limitations are. I look forward to seeing you there.Brian Berry, PhD | Vice Provost of Research and Dean of the Graduate SchoolAI Council Chair
- Other plans
- Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
- DR website/book(s)
- Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
- We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
- Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
- What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
- AB has a paper under revision.
- DR has a paper just published.
- Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit.
- Other
- Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
- Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
- Any other updates or announcements?
- Readings/viewings for discussion. Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion.
- Not evaluated yet
- https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
- https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
- https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
- Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
- Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
- We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
- Let's evaluate a few more of them.
- LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
- Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
- Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
- Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
- Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
- LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
- Evaluated
- 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
- Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
- 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf.
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
- Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
- (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.
- We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
- Back burner "when possible" items:
- SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
- Any projects that MS students can sign up for? If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
- Please suggest a project!

