Carnegie Mellon University will host a series of free public events this summer aimed at providing a better understanding of the powerful generative artificial intelligence tools that have become widely popular over the past few months.
It's part of an effort being led by CMU's recently launched Generative AI Innovation Incubator, an initiative from its School of Computer Science that is looking to invite interested stakeholders who could help shape the future of these AI tools.
CMU faculty will host events in the form of lectures, interactive group projects and community engagement sessions over the coming months that will aim to shed more insights about generative AI, which is the technology behind the popular ChatGPT product from OpenAI Inc., among others.
"The Generative AI Innovation Incubator will not only provide instruction, practice and mentored group projects, but it will also host community engagement sessions with facilitated presentations and discussion about societal issues," Carolyn Rosé, interim director of the Language Technologies Institute and a professor of language technologies and human-computer interaction at CMU, said in a prepared statement. "The goal is to shape the direction of continued work on AI toward positive societal ends."
A keynote talk from Roni Rosenfeld, the head of the machine learning department at CMU and a professor of machine learning, language technologies, computer science and computational biology, will mark the first of these events on May 26. Several panel discussions will follow in June including how generative AI is being used in education and its impact on work as well as how the technology is being implemented in medicine and public health.
Over a dozen events have been scheduled to take place thus far as part of this series.
The launch of CMU's Generative AI Innovation Incubator follows a separate development from a few weeks prior that saw the prestigious university receive a $20 million commitment from the U.S. National Science Foundation and other federal agencies to create one of seven new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes. That funding came as part of a larger $140 million investment over the next five years that looks to advance AI research on ethical and trustable uses for the powerful technical tool that has grown increasingly more popular and powerful over the past few years. For its part, CMU will lead the AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM), which will look to identify and assess AI tools being used by emergency responders, health officials and others who operate in intense and time-sensitive environments.AC
