Saturday, May 17, 2025

5/16/25: Book project redux

 Artificial Intelligence Study Group

 Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be removed from the invite list as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda & Minutes (163rd meeting, May 16, 2025)

Table of Contents
* Agenda and minutes
* Appendix: Transcript (when available)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements, updates, questions, presentations, etc. as time allows.
    • Today:
      • Can using an AI to write a book be a good half-sized (3-credit) master's project?
        • Book itself is not the product.
        • Product is how it was done. The road more than the destination.
        • How to do an appropriate report?
          • Answer question of: how to replicate the process? (for students or for whoever the audience is to be)
          • Journal of activities and progress made?
            • Use diagramming to show the journey

          • Comparison of tools was a good slide content
          • https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe?language=en
          • Read: "How to Lie With Statistics" 
            • https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics/5oSU5PepogEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
      • Can using an AI to write a book be a good full-sized (6-credit) master's project?
        • Books can (someday) have videos, quizzes, interactive Q&A, ... a gardening book or an agent that is like a book but much better.
        • Website instead of book?
        • A book is just an instantiation of a richer, more generalized form of information. 
        • Compare multiple models, or a model against a predefined rubric
      • How should a half- vs. full-sized book writing project be different?
      • Should there be more such projects?
        • Keep this group involved so everyone is on board as it goes along. No surprises at the end.
        • Need more future oriented projects that explore beyond books...
    • Some time? EG and DD could do a session on programming AIs (loading AI model into video card, programming, etc.). Could talk about rapids.ai. MJ would like to publicize to some students once we have a definite schedule for this. (We'll do it twice, once just for us and once for external invitees.)
    • Summer AI course: Interested in Machine Learning? Check Out IFSC 7399: Data Fundamentals (Summer 2025 - Second Half (07/07-08/08)).
      • ST: Data Fundamentals
      • CRN: 30354 Subject IFSC Course Number 7399 Section H01 
      • Class meets MWR 9:00am-12:00pm, EIT 220
      • Instructor: Wu, Ningning
      • If you're eager to learn machine learning techniques and gain hands-on experience with the core components of data science and ML/DL workflows, IFSC 7399: Data Fundamentals is the course for you!
      • In this course, we will explore a range of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques and their applications to real-world data. Topics will include key stages of a typical ML project: data preprocessing, profiling, transformation, exploratory data analysis, supervised and unsupervised learning, ensemble models, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation and comparison. We will also address important considerations such as managing biased datasets and detecting model overfitting.
      • Throughout the course, we will work with popular Python libraries such as Pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, and Fastai. Real-world datasets will be used extensively to provide hands-on experience with the core components of data science and ML/DL workflows. Additionally, we will emphasize best practices for selecting appropriate models and interpreting their outputs effectively.
      • By the end of the course, you will feel more confident and equipped to work with data and apply machine learning techniques in practical settings.
      • Topics covered:
    • • Overview of Python Programming
      • Overview of Database Programming
      • Overview of Pandas Programming
      • Data Preprocessing, Profiling, and Transformation
      • Supervised Learning
      • Unsupervised Learning
      • Model Evaluation and Hyperparameter Tuning
      • Introduction of Deep Learning
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • We did the Chapter 6 video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc, up to time 13:08. We can start there next time we do it.
  • Schedule back burner "when possible" items:
    • TE is in the informal campus faculty AI discussion group. 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."
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about?
    • If anyone else has a project they would like to help supervise, let me know.
    • (2/14/25) An ad hoc group is forming on campus for people to discuss AI and teaching of diverse subjects by ES. It would be interesting to hear from someone in that group at some point to see what people are thinking and doing regarding AIs and their teaching activities.
    • The campus has assigned a group to participate in the AAC&U AI Institute's activity "AI Pedagogy in the Curriculum." IU is on it and may be able to provide updates now and then.
  • Here is the latest on future readings and viewings
    • https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
    • https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
    • https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html
      (Biology of Large Language Models)
    • We can work through chapter 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jl0dxWQs8
    • https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2024/12/22/10-ai-predictions-for-2025/
    • Prompt engineering course:
      https://apps.cognitiveclass.ai/learning/course/course-v1:IBMSkillsNetwork+AI0117EN+v1/home
    • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361

Appendix: Transcript
   
AI Discussion Group  

Fri, May 16, 2025

0:07 - D.B.
Give it another minute and then we'll get started. Well, OK, so welcome, everyone. So You may recall from last week that we had a book presentation. Somebody wrote a book for a half-size, three-credit master's project. And there was quite a bit of discussion. When we went into the private committee discussion, though, the committee had some questions. Let's put it that way, about whether it's a reasonable master's project. So I was thinking of potentially recruiting more students to write books. At the beginning of the semester, we had three, two of them left, but should I get more in the future? So that's my question for the group, is using AI to write a book a good master's project? And we could start with half-size, but it's also about full-size.

2:35 - D.B.
So I'll just take any opinions or discussion about it.

2:39 - E.G.
I think the book is tangential. It's the how. Basically, what did they do to do that? That should be the book. The output, the book itself is a documentation of what it's done, but the real book should be, how did they do it?

2:58 - R.S.
I had a similar comment since I served on the committee. I was kind of confused as far as what I should be grading or assessing because I had a book that was generated by AI, and all I had was a bunch of PowerPoint slides, which was their thesis presentation, but nothing exactly what you just said. It was, you know, if someone's doing a master's project, they need to be able to write up how they did it. Exactly. Because if we have someone looking at this that's not on the committee, it's not comprehensible.

3:38 - E.G.
One of the things about science is its repeatability. Able to follow a certain protocol in getting to the same destination.

3:49 - M.M.
Yeah, but E.T. actually add some slides. She corrected in using our and R.S. comments exactly, E.G., what you say. So in the future, yes, we really appreciate, E.T., you add some slides. But in the future, we to see more documents about the process.

4:14 - D.B.
I want to jump in and say congratulations to E.T. She definitely graduated, but the project generated a lot of discussion. And the question then is not really about E.T. It's really about what I should be doing in the future.

4:30 - E.G.
Yeah. Yeah, E.T., please don't take this as a...

4:34 - D.B.
I invited E.T. to be present today, but just to be clear, really, it's not about her at all.

4:42 - Unidentified Speaker
Exactly.

4:42 - E.T.
E.T., what do you think? Oh no, thank you for the feedback. I mean this, my other graduate project was more like a hands-on. We worked with a business and we did assessment. It was more like cyber security assessment for that small business. So this was the first time I'm doing and the other three credits of the project. And I really appreciate the feedback, all the feedback. What I think I definitely agree with more, adding more information science, I mean, more like how I did it and what methods I have used or how was the process to write the book. But again, since it was my first time, so this is how they came out.

5:39 - D.B.
Well, especially since I told, I suggested to you that the book was sufficient as a report, but that was my opinion. Apparently it's not widely shared.

5:47 - V.W.
And I think we need to remember that we're on the cusp of a revolution that we've never been through before. This is not just new to us, this is new to the whole world. And even how we look back on this period of history, and the things that we produce during this period. There may be things that we produce now that we think will always be continually produced, but in fact we could be in a little golden age of the dawn of AI, which will then subside into a more utilitarian and pedestrian time. So I think it's difficult for us to judge too closely in retrospect what's happening now, and I do agree with the emphasis that the work product is the way we judge whether the tools we used were appropriate, but it is the making of where most of the science is on how we can improve the process by which we generate this content. So I think there's a couple of different nuances in the way we view this.

6:54 - E.G.
The adage that I like to use is an intelligent person learns from their mistakes. A wise person learns from other people's mistakes. At this point, we don't know any of the mistakes you've made, so as we go to replicate it, we're going to make the same mistakes, stumble over the same things that you stumbled over.

7:20 - D.B.
Okay. Any other comments from anybody?

7:23 - J.H.
I shared my feedback in our meeting earlier today. But I do think this was really a good project in the context, which is that the student is a teacher and this really has some great relevance to classroom exercises. So I don't know if the area of improvement may be contextualizing it more, but I think it was a great effort.

7:53 - D.B.
This sort of makes me think What if, instead of a report on sort of the prompt engineering aspects, how to do it as a message to the committee members, but rather lessons learned in terms of how to teach high school students to write books using AI based on the experience of doing it?

8:20 - S.C.
Yes, that's close to the comment that I make, which is to be aware of the audience beyond the committee, because what she's doing is modeling how to do such a thing appropriately using AI.

8:37 - V.W.
That's a good point, and also the grade or the mark shouldn't be based on just gardening. It should be based on how much our ability to garden is amplified by the mastery of tools that we've now accomplished. Okay.

8:57 - Unidentified Speaker
Any other thoughts, anybody?

8:58 - D.B.
Well, then the question is, well, you know, what would go in the report then? You say how it was done, but I mean, you know, I don't know how it was done. It was, you know, you sort of muddle your way through it, learning as you go. How do you put that into a report?

9:24 - V.W.
I've noticed that when I use LLMs, I'd originally thought that I would use the whole conversation context as my work product on the how it was made. But then I found, because I was using multiple LLMs and thinking in between, that it looked more like a designer's notebook of scratched out stuff and false attempts that didn't pay off and roads that forked. I think the diagram of that process is the work product as opposed to just whatever it is the LLM produced, because we are working in a man-machine interface here, person-machine interface, and we want to record the productive decision-making and the unproductive decision-making in using this information bulldozer.

10:15 - J.C.
So in her talk last week, she talked somewhat about prompts that didn't work, things that she learned to get to the point where they actually would work, and she did a comparison of tools. And I think that comparison of tools might be a point too. I was thinking back, if you go back 35 years, the things that was comparable to AI now might have just been the internet, web pages. And someone doing a project then could have compared browsers, could have talked about the technology that they had to apply to get the web page. But then you've got, what was that web page about? Was it about gardening? Was it a advertising page for a business? We, you're at the border of the technology and the utility.

11:18 - D.B.
It's an interesting comparison, because, you know, when I think about what's going on with AI, right now, it just, it's such a parallel, mid 90s, when the when the web startup was just getting into it, and doing all kinds of stuff and excited about it, just like they are about AI now.

11:40 - Unidentified Speaker
Exactly.

11:41 - M.M.
This is That's what J.C. mentioned and is correct, because so many browsers, they die. They are not anymore existing. And actually, I listened yesterday, Flipping Book's presentation, but in Flipping Book also they include the video, not only images. And this is really the very, very attractive way for customers. So even the books, flipping book, flipping book, but with video, text and video inside. And it's very, very interesting. So yeah, what kind of book is also interesting to figure out, because when a simple book is just the text, but they can have a video generation or asking for, emails or asking for payments or some interaction included. So what kind of book?

12:44 - V.W.
There was a TED talk by B.G. some years ago about how doctors or researchers in medicine don't publish negative results because negative results don't usually result in more funding. And he made the criticism of that being the de facto process because when you don't publish a negative result, then everyone else is doomed to repeat that and rediscover it. And so we're not adding to the corpus of knowledge when we don't publish unproductive outcomes from disciplined experimental methods. It's actually worse than that.

13:20 - D.B.
It's worse than that because if there's no effect and 20 people do experiments, one of them is by chance going to be significant at the 0.05 level. The one that's going to be published.

13:34 - V.W.
And those guys can p-hack their way into making stuff look like it's happened when it hasn't. I've put the link into the chat on B.G.'s talk, and even though it's in a different context, the structure of the issue that we're discussing is very similar, and the lesson learned is also similar. I love that P-hack. Yeah, there's a Veritasium video that very eloquently discusses P-hacking and just how serious a level of second-order ignorance that we're in is a result of that. Oh, there was a famous author who said, there's lies, there's damn lies.

14:21 - D.B.
There's a wonderful book titled How to Lie with Statistics, and it's not a manual for how to do it, it's a manual how to protect yourself from other people looting. It's published several decades ago, still just as good as it was then.

14:43 - E.G.
Actually, add that to that. I wouldn't mind reading it.

14:48 - Unidentified Speaker
What?

14:49 - E.G.
How to lie with statistics. Yeah.

14:51 - E.G.
But like you said, it's not how to do it, but it's a defense. It's like a shield to recognize it.

15:01 - D.B.
If you want to get your own copy, just go on Amazon and you'll find it. I'm sure it's available still. All right. Well, okay. Well, then back to the question. How do you do an appropriate report? Is a comparison of tools, a journal, is that going to do it? Or is that enough? I mean, the journal is a pretty undigested kind of work.

15:32 - V.W.
I think flowcharting and diagramming tools are going to become more important as the complexity of the activities that we're doing increases. We can't just have a purely text rendering because no one has a navigational roadmap to see what happened. But you can't have the roadmap without explaining the sites you saw on the way. So I think that would be one way of looking at it.

16:00 - D.B.
Also, I've put the how to lie with statistics link in the chat. Okay.

16:05 - V.W.
So you're saying I had some diagrams of the journey? A diagramming technologies that document both the good starts, the unproductive starts, and the reasons why you took those directions, those are visual roadmaps into the exploration of the knowledge space that was taking place. I've done a lot of work in knowledge mapping and found out a lot of things about it in bioinformatics when you have a very complex tapestry of relationships that you want to, in the most economical way, render so that people can see the interrelationships. Learned some things about the value of diagramming those things. And I mean, it might be worth looking at that.

16:49 - V.W.
Like what kind of diagrams?

16:51 - V.W.
I tell you what, talk about something else for two minutes and I'll post one.

16:56 - D.B.
I mean, I just taught a course on, you know, systems analysis, basically diagrams, semi-formal graphical methods of And there's several formalisms, all of which have their place. Do you have any thoughts on what goes into an appropriate report for this?

17:17 - J.H.
I think, again, kind of given the context of the student's profession, an artifact on how to replicate the process, essentially, that could be put on maybe github and used by other students and other teachers may have been really great I mean obviously if somebody had taken this this artifact and use it in a classroom or shown that they could replicate it that would have added even more Yeah.

17:50 - D.B.
OK. Any other comments, anyone? All right. Well, here's my next question. I mean, this is sort of in the context of a three-credit, half-size project. But a lot of students need to do six-credit, full-size projects. What's the difference? I mean, is a book project only for three-credit students?

18:37 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

18:37 - J.C.
And I guess one of, we're getting into something new. So is a book even the desired output? What would you really want for a gardening book today? Would you want it to be able to ask it and get videos? Would you want it to be able to do interaction with you, do Q&As? I had an experience this last week. I got a survey email from Microsoft, and I figured it was going to be ask 10 questions, you know, 0 to 10, rank this. And the first question, it asked for a comment. And I put a comment in, and it came back and said, that's interesting. Talked, it was obviously an AI. And it was gathering further information from me. So it, it changed what a survey is. A survey is not just the tabulation of those, the scores you gave things, it's a dynamic dynamic interaction with the person being questioned. Will we even want gardening books or will we want an agent that we interact with about gardening?

19:55 - D.B.
This is the point, yes, like an interactive So you could imagine, don't just write a book, write an example of the book of the future.

20:16 - M.M.
But this includes a lot of knowledge of agents, because this is what you know, interaction needs action, needs agent. So it's more complicated from technical point of view.

20:36 - D.B.
Yeah, now you're not just writing, you're including, you know, calls to AIs for interaction and things like that. Yeah.

20:47 - M.M.
Depending really how much time, but they can do it for three months. This is visible. I can do it.

20:59 - D.B.
Well, this would be a six-month project. No, eight-month project, really. What about a website instead of a book?

21:10 - M.M.
You have a special program for this.

21:14 - M.M.
T. is teaching this special program for web design. If you want to do it, I, for example, have one student that graduate master student with game it's a she has a game plus mobile application if you are interested about this approach games now I guess the reason I mentioned a website is because you could put all the information in a book in a website and then in a day you have the technical task of making a website.

21:57 - V.W.
I wonder if machine learning and AI are going to change the definitions of books. When the web came along and hypertext came along and you could have anything linked to anything else, and then Wikipedia emerged as a more debugged version of its original self, what we thought of as what a book meant as a consolidation of a domain of knowledge that then changed. And so now things we, a few months ago or weeks ago, we encountered a paper where every figure was animated. And if we clicked on that figure, we saw what the researcher saw when they first obtained their data. So what the meaning of a book is, what the meaning of a paper is, you know, that all changed with the internet, with the personal computer and with hypertext. It's changing again with the advent of machine learning. So maybe our notion of what a book is, books did survive all that and they are still things that we buy. I still buy hardcover books from Amazon, but nonetheless, there are more general forms of information dispersion that are not just taking the place of books, but are giving us more vivid experiences that we can digest in a shorter period of time than, say, just the rote process of reading a book.

23:24 - E.G.
Now, I'm going to ask you a question, V.W., because this is something that I'm interested in. Is that transition now getting us to the point where we cannot read a long book that if we don't get the information we need in such a very condensed format that we lose interest quickly and move on?

23:44 - V.W.
There are two artifacts of this revolution that you and I have lived for through. And that is what George Lucas used to use as a seven second rule. And every clip in Star Wars never lasts longer than seven seconds because otherwise he'd lose his audience. That changed to four and then to two seconds in the MTV generation for us sitting down and reading a book that doesn't directly answer the questions we had. And we picked it up. It's no longer a meaningful use of time because we can now have the answers to our directed queries instantly. And then we can assemble the the hallway of knowledge that we walk down to just be populated with what we care about at that moment. And that's the kind of a crisis in education. Do we just train students for the present directed path of knowledge that we think is important? Or do we still provide general education that lets people themselves synthesize trains of reasoning, directed lines of thinking and that sort of thing? I mean, I don't have an answer to that. It's just like, it's all in flux. And so that's what's leading.

24:47 - D.B.
Hang on. Let's just make sure everybody has a chance to.

24:52 - J.C.
So I was thinking maybe our book's the target. What if you targeted scientific papers? What's the form of a scientific paper in this age?

25:03 - V.W.
And I gave an example of that recently, and I guess I should go dig it up real quick. It was, I think it was from Anthropic. I'll have to get a look at that. Hang on. While you're doing that, I...

25:21 - V.W.
And it would make sense in an innovation and academic...

25:25 - J.C.
Let J.C. continue. Yeah. When I think of Science Magazine, one of the really interesting things it does is present science to a really broad audience. It's where if you're a chemist, you can read about anthropology and vice versa. So, often, if there's something like when they found the hobbit skeletons in Indonesia, there'll be a couple of columns in the news about it, and then there'll be a feature that's written so that cross-disciplinary people with a 12th grade literacy can read it, and then there's the paper, and then there's links to online data and other stuff. So you can look at that science either in a very condensed form, this was a neat thing that happened this month, or you can dig all the way down to the data, look at images, and if you could interact with that, so you could ask your questions, but did they do this? But did they do that? Or what are the statistics? A different statistic on it. But it could be a different thing. It could be a paper that would educate you about the paper and the field.

26:49 - E.G.
J.C., what you bring up, I think, marries what we were discussing. If we only go after the information, the microcosm that we're looking to solve, we don't know what we don't know. And until we get to that point and come across it in the broad spectrum reading, we're only going to just be able to answer today's worries and not tomorrow's innovation.

27:19 - V.W.
Well, I've posted an example of the Anthropic modern paper, and it's called The Biology of an LLM. And if you dive into this, you'll see that you're not just reading a paper, you're actually experiencing the knowledge as the researchers encountered it. And it's now been digested, pre-digested for you, but it's been actualized because it's not static anymore. It's the animation's worth a thousand pictures, which are each worth a thousand words.

27:56 - J.H.
Two other ways that, you know, the project could potentially be, sort of uplifted a bit, is if there was a comparison of more than one model's performance or comparison of the output against a defined rubric.

28:12 - D.B.
Can you repeat that one more time?

28:14 - J.H.
Comparison of the performance of more than one model or comparison of one model's output against a defined rubric.

28:29 - D.B.
Against a predefined rubric?

28:31 - J.H.
Yeah, I think likely a predefined rubric, you know, potentially even a pre-existing or seminal rubric.

28:41 - D.B.
Well, some of these are going to require, like if you get a..., like some of these master's students are, you know, they're not..., OK, I sent you a draft of the draft.

29:00 - Unidentified Speaker
Pardon?

29:00 - Y.P.
Sorry, that was my daughter who did not know I'm not a noob.

29:06 - D.B.
Sorry, darling. Yeah, so I can't just go to a typical master's student and say, well, you know, a book is just an instantiation of richer, more generalized form of information. So go do it. You know, they need more structure than that.

29:25 - J.C.
But again, back to the web page analogy, the first web pages were pretty basic, just text. And of course, we were working with very slow dial-in modems, so you couldn't put much. But the evolution there may parallel what we get here.

29:53 - D.B.
All right, well, I think we sort of addressed this one to some degree.

30:00 - D.B.
All right, next question.

30:01 - D.B.
I mean, should I recruit more students for more of these things? Or have we kind of tried it and had fun with it and on to something else?

30:14 - E.G.
I think we should. But instead of looking for the book, let's look at..., But instead of the destination, I'd be more interested in the road.

30:30 - D.B.
And it kind of ties back with...

30:39 - V.W.
It's almost existential in the sense of we need to smell the rose as opposed to... Always be headed towards some nebulous goal.

31:02 - Unidentified Speaker
I like your links then.

31:05 - Unidentified Speaker
Wonderful.

31:05 - M.M.
The biology of large language model. Yeah. And another one you can share. I think those will be useful for people.

31:17 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

31:17 - V.W.
Very useful.

31:18 - M.M.
Thank you so so much.

31:21 - Unidentified Speaker
All right, well, I'm debating.

31:23 - D.B.
If I do find another student to do it, I'd like to have them do it in the context of this group reporting each week and so on. And I hope you all are willing to provide feedback as they go along and not have any surprises at the end.

31:48 - Y.P.
D.B., I joined late. It seems that W. or somebody has created this process of making the book based on our meeting last week.

31:57 - Y.P.
Is that what is happening?

31:59 - D.B.
I'm just trying to understand your question. But yeah, last week we had a master's defense based on a project of writing a book using AI.

32:09 - Y.P.
Yes, I was there.

32:10 - D.B.
Today we're hashing out how to do it right next time.

32:14 - Y.P.
Got it, got it.

32:16 - D.B.
I mean, not how to do the..., how to write a book, but how to run a project, how to run the book project, how, you know, me as the advisor, for example, should, should, should coach a student through the..., through getting their..., doing this as a master's project.

32:37 - Y.P.
And D.B., I'm assuming you only need UALR students, right? Would you, would you be okay to have students who are part of the university system, or do you rather prefer UALR students?

32:51 - D.B.
Oh, this group is accessible to anyone. Do I have time to advise a project at ASMSC? The Arkansas School of Math Science. Yeah, I mean, I'm willing to consider it. I could certainly be on a committee if someone helps one of the teachers at ASMSC. To coach the student. So I'm not ruling it out. I do have limited time. If I put time into another university, then it's less time for UALR. That's not necessarily a problem for me, but could potentially be a problem for UALR. So yeah, it's a possibility. I may get back to you.

33:33 - Y.P.
Let me talk to the teacher. All right.

33:36 - D.B.
Is one of your kids going there?

33:39 - Y.P.
Both my kids are going there. I know a teacher and they will be part of the hackathon in June. If you want to meet them in person, they both will be doing the AI mental health hackathon.

33:53 - D.B.
OK. Well, there's probably ASMSE teachers who would like to, you know, be involved with something at UALR.

33:59 - Y.P.
Yeah, I agree. OK, let me get back to you. Thank you.

34:03 - D.B.
OK. So, I guess my sense was a general positive. Yeah, I think it's positive.

34:14 - D.D.
I mean, that would certainly give them some expertise in using a large language model to do a project. I mean, it would help them.

34:33 - D.D.
I think it's a good idea.

34:37 - Unidentified Speaker
Should there be more such projects?

34:41 - Y.P.
Do you mean more projects of making books? Or do you mean more projects of building other things like maybe website or software product or something? You mean by that point?

35:02 - D.B.
Yeah, I guess I'm not somewhat flexible and ambiguous. I mean, we do need projects. The students need projects. And to me, writing a book and making a website that has the information in a book are similar, not dissimilar projects. And some of the other things we talked about are certainly possible. So instead of saying, should there be more such projects, Well, what sorts should there be and what sorts of projects?

35:34 - D.D.
Well, building software would certainly be better.

35:39 - M.M.
And we have some requests from industry partners that give us good suggestions. But like I say, mostly it's with genetic AI, including more interaction. Between the content and users?

35:55 - D.B.
Well, there is a need for other kinds of projects too. I mean, we just have, we have a bunch of students, they need projects.

36:05 - V.W.
So yeah, that's certainly- It would be interesting if there was some kind of competition where students could use multiple modalities. In fact, maybe they could choose from five or six different modalities, the book, the website, a 30 second advertisement, an explainer video, some kind of interactive guided tour, courtesy AI and HTML. It might be nice to have a competition that which one would be the most engaging form of the transmission of some domain of knowledge that was essential to be transmitted. And we need a Darwinian way of putting all these out and then naturally selecting those that survived and then using that refinement process to carry us on into what the next thing might be. And S.C. put an excellent comment in the chat about students are going to come to us with ideas that reflect advances two or three steps past this, and we need to make sure that we're not constraining them so much that they can't demonstrate those more advanced concepts that are coming down the pipe.

37:15 - D.B.
I like that idea.

37:17 - Unidentified Speaker
Correct.

37:17 - M.M.
And you're linking to personalization right now, because some people are audio, some people video.

37:24 - V.W.
Like learning style, kinetic learners, haptic learners, visual learners, auditory learners. And then that's the customization of learning. And we're all here in this conference because we have a learning style that is sympathetic to the way information comes to us in this medium. But there's a lot of people out there who could benefit from other ways of transmitting that information, including books on gardening even.

37:53 - Y.P.
Maybe when we will learn from this mental health hackathon and do like skills health hackathon in winter with all these different topics. That's a great idea.

38:08 - V.W.
This will make a great topic of a hackathon is to give people five or six ways of accomplishing an engagement transfer task. They do it, they show it to the audience, and then your audience is tested for how much they retained. So the audience fills out a survey at the end, and the winner of the contest maybe isn't the one that made the most dramatic presentation. The winner of the contest is the one whose audience sector performed the best on recalling the information that they were presented using this five or six different modalities of transmission.

38:44 - Y.P.
Yeah, is M. on the call?

38:47 - M.M.
If she's hearing, she has the next slide. I participate in this kind of competition with IWS awarding new startup companies and they ask the audience to vote.

39:04 - V.W.
Yes, yeah, A-B testing, test audience, you know, no picture goes to the theater without having been subjected to a test audience that tells you if the movie is going to do well enough at the box office to justify its great expense of distribution.

39:26 - D.B.
Right. Any last thoughts on the topic? OK, so, yeah, I mean, there's, we're almost at the end of time, but I'll just have a couple of announcements. So we talked about E.G. and D.D. doing a session on programming AI. So no pressure. I know you have other things to do in life, but if we get to the point where you'd like to do it, we certainly would look forward to it. And also, there's gonna be a course offered this summer. I understand there's gonna be a course offered this summer. Still have to find enough students to take it, probably will find them. It's going to be an AI course. It's our data fundamentals course, but that's just an empty shell of a title. And it's really going to be about AI. Dr. W. is going to teach it in the second part of the summer, so part of July and August, July and part of August.

40:29 - J.H.
Professor W. is an excellent instructor.

40:31 - D.B.
Yeah, I would think be a good course.

40:34 - J.H.
It's going to be really good.

40:37 - J.H.
I wish that I could take it, but I know I need to be writing research instead.

40:43 - V.W.
She taught an excellent computer security and networking course, too, that was very well executed.

40:48 - J.H.
She does a really good job, I think, of formulating real-world exercises and making students.

40:53 - D.B.
So, yeah, so this is the Thumbnail of the course, leave a minute to read it.

41:03 - M.M.
You mentioned that D.D. published a very good book chapter. D.D., you have to prepare something for us.

41:13 - D.D.
Well, I'd be happy to do that.

41:16 - M.M.
Are you talking about?

41:18 - Unidentified Speaker
Your chapter.

41:20 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

41:21 - D.D.
Well, I'm doing something with E.G. right now.

41:25 - Unidentified Speaker
OK.

41:26 - D.D.
We're working on some presentations for the group, but yeah, I could do that. OK. Can we give you a minute to read this?

41:37 - M.M.
Did I send you the part of your chapter to you? I can send you, if you don't have it separated.

41:46 - D.D.
Are you talking about? Springer book.

41:49 - M.M.
They sent you the whole book?

41:52 - D.D.
Yeah. You sent me the paper that was published. I've got that, but I haven't got the whole book. You can download the whole book. I tried.

42:04 - M.M.
You know, I logged into the university and everything and it wouldn't let me.

42:10 - D.D.
Oh, I will send you the whole book.

42:14 - M.M.
That would be really nice.

42:16 - D.D.
OK.

42:16 - D.D.
Because many...

42:17 - Unidentified Speaker
I did.

42:18 - D.D.
I just uploaded the presentation. For the other paper for the computer, the computing conference. OK, great. Yeah, so I recorded that today and sent it to them. So hopefully that'll all be done by the end of next month and I'll be published again.

42:41 - M.M.
Looking forward to see E.G. and D.D.'s work.

42:45 - Unidentified Speaker
All right.

42:46 - D.B.
Yes.

42:48 - D.B.
And as always, this forum is a great place to rehearse talks and stuff like that. Any other updates or announcements, anyone? All right, so go ahead.

42:59 - Y.P.
I just want to say thank you to you all for giving me feedback for my course. I might be making some tweaks based on the feedback that I've got. So just wanted to let you know. And once it's final, I'll share with you all again. But I'm making some adjustments based on the inputs I've gotten. Thank you. All right.

43:25 - D.B.
All right, well, we're just about at the end. I guess I don't have anything specific scheduled for next time, although something could come up. So if nothing else preempts, next time we'll finish up the Chapter 6 video from that series of videos on AI theory and mathematics and animations that we've done the first five and a half chapters of And with that, I guess, anything else anyone want to mention before we adjourn?

44:01 - V.W.
Well, 3Blue1Brown interviewed T.T. and did a great historical piece on cosmic measuring sticks that is sort of in that 3Blue1Brown quality presentation. So I was really absorbed in that last night, and I thought it was good enough to mention.

44:22 - D.B.
I should probably drop a link, but I don't have it at ready disposal yet. Yeah. So V.W. just mentioned 3Blue1Brown. That's the name of the channel or whatever it is on YouTube where this Chapter 6 video is. The person who does it specializes in very polished animations of difficult concepts, like AI.

44:44 - D.B.
Stunning, stunningly good presentations.

44:46 - V.W.
Yeah. All right, everyone.

44:48 - D.B.
Well, thanks for joining in. We'll see you next time.

44:53 - D.D.
Bye guys.

44:54 - D.D.
Have a good weekend.

44:57 - M.M.
Bye.

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