Speakers
Description
An interdisciplinary team from the University of Florida and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University are leading a project to enhance diversity, access, impact of a strong AI curriculum. Artificial intelligence is poised to make unprecedented impacts across all aspects of our society. Developing technical expertise in AI or relegating AI education to the computer and data science disciplines is not sufficient to develop a diverse and prepared AI workforce. The more pressing challenge is to fully embrace the interdisciplinarity of effective AI by building flexible, inclusive learning pathways that allow students of diverse educational backgrounds and technical maturity to engage these emerging technologies and help solve the complex, real-world problems affecting our communities. Meeting this grand challenge requires acknowledging the importance of and intentionally building cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary pathways to ensure that our future AI-enabled workforce has the diversity of backgrounds, experiences and expertise necessary to engage our most difficult problems ethically and equitably.
The objective of this project is to jump-start our long-term efforts to facilitate unfettered access to cutting-edge technologies, expertise and experiential learning resources being developed at UF to diverse students across Florida and beyond, providing the next-generation workforce with the skills they need to work across institutional, disciplinary and historical disparity boundaries to solve real-world problems affecting our communities. To achieve this objective, our team of researchers and educators from UF and our partnerinstitution, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) will pursue four aims:
1. Facilitate virtual AI curriculum across the state.
2. Expand participation of diverse students.
3. Address real-world AI needs with experiential learning.
4. Assessment of student gains and project evaluation for program sustainaibility
