Sunday, September 7, 2025

9/12/25: ES leads discussion of book "The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions"

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 & Status (178th meeting, Sept. 12, 2025)

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

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
    • ES will tell us about The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions, by Geoff Woods. Please help discuss it, ask questions, etc.!
The meeting ended here. 
    • Sept. 19: DD will step us through the IBM free prompt course.
    • Th Dec. 11 4:30: Students in YP's AI course will present their projects.
    • Here are 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.
      • JH suggests a project in which AI is used to help students adjust their resumes to match key terms in job descriptions, to help their resumes bubble to the top when the many resumes are screened early in the hiring process.
      • JC suggested: social media are using AI to decide what to present to us, the notorious "algorithms." Suggestion: a social media cockpit from which users can say what sorts of things they want. Screen scrape the user's feeds from social media outputs to find the right stuff. Project could be adapted to either tech-savvy CS or application-oriented IS or IQ students.
      • VW had some specific AI-related topics that need books about them.  
      • DD suggests having a student do something related to Mark Windsor's presentation. He might like to be involved, but this would not be absolutely necessary.
        • markwindsorr@atlas-research.io writes on 7/14/2025: Our research PDF processing and text-to-notebook workflows are now in beta and ready for you to try,
          • You can now: 
            • - Upload research papers (PDF) or paste in an arXiv link and get executable notebooks
            • - Generate notebook workflows from text prompts
            • - Run everything directly in our shared Jupyter environment
            • This is an early beta, so expect some rough edges - but we're excited to get your feedback on what's working and what needs improvement.
            • Log In Here: https://atlas-research.io
  • Updates
    • AI course updates? 
    • LG? Book writing project
      • Working on how to write the book. Have different agents doing different roles? 
      • Topic of book will likely be: personal investing.
      • Committee: DB, MM, RS
      • Need to keep a log of activities and results, to become the final report. 
    •  DD?
  • Other 
    • Any questions you'd like to bring up for discussion, just let me know.
      • on 9/8/2025, Blackboard said: 
        • "This release introduces improvements in instructional design and assessment grading: 
        • AI-Powered Feedback Summaries: Instructors can use the new Summarize option when grading assessments to generate AI-driven overall feedback based on the graded rubric, with options to edit, accept, reject, or regenerate."
    • 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.
    • 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
    • Evaluation was 3.75 by 6 people on 8/8/25 for: Use the same process as above but on another article.
    • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • Prompt engineering course. 
      • Also at Syllabus page: https://apps.cognitiveclass.ai/learning/course/course-v1:IBMSkillsNetwork+AI0117EN+v1/home. 
      • Registration page: https://apps.cognitiveclass.ai/learning/course/course-v1:IBMSkillsNetwork+AI0117EN+v1/home
      • Requires registering. DD volunteered to register if it is free, so we can check it out briefly and decide if to do the course in detail.
    • Evaluation was 3.5 by 6 people on 8/8/25: Put the following into an AI and interact - ask it to summarize, etc.
      • 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.
    • 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.
    • Not yet evaluated
    • 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.)
    • 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?
        • 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. 

      Appendix: Transcript
       




at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)