The Biggio Center, in partnership with the Office of the Provost IT, the Office of Information Technology and the AI@AU Initiative, hosted an "AI playground" for students from 9 to11:00 a.m. on Jan. 25. Held in the Melton Student Center, On the Pl(AI)ns taught students about the possibilities of incorporating AI into their academic and future careers.
A long line of students waiting to attend On the Pl(AI)ns stretched past the Foy Information Desk as attendants scanned them in. Before entering the rooms, sponsors offered student attendees breakfast items, t-shirts, stickers, hats and pens. On the Pl(AI)ns hosted representatives from Microsoft and Salesforce in the student center and the Academic Classroom and Laboratory Complex to show students, staff and faculty how the university can incorporate AI into daily activities.
The event follows a recent surge in the development of AI technologies. Programs like Chat-GPT took over classrooms and academia in late 2022, leaving many institutions scrambling to adjust to rapidly evolving AI technology and regulate student use.
Chelsy Hooper, the instructional technology specialist at the Innovation and Research Commons in the Ralph Brown Draughon Library, hosted the first presentation. She demonstrated new AI tools by the Adobe Creative Cloud and showed students how to sign up for an Adobe Creative license, which is included in tuition.
Hooper showed the tools within Adobe Creative AI, including a demonstration of her autogenerating photos for podcast covers. Adobe's AI also offers generative fill or expand in Photoshop, text-based editing and AI-powered audio tools for recordings.
After Hooper's presentation, students saw a brief presentation on a free course offered by the Biggio Center on enhancing learning with AI. The course provided an introduction to AI, safe and ethical ways of using AI, using chat-based AI tools with prompts, understanding text generative AI and methods of generating code or media with AI.
Microsoft hosted the next exhibit, which displayed the company's new AI assistant, Microsoft Copilot. There, Microsoft representatives performed different scenarios in which college students could use Copilot.
The different scenarios utilizing Copilot included:
- composing professional or casual emails through instructions supplied by the user;
- searching through a user's Outlook and compiling summaries on senders, meetings and messages;
- translating data and inputting it into Excel sheets;
- creating images through written prompts;
- transforming information from documents into a PowerPoint presentation;
- building and evaluating a user's job resume.
After experiencing Microsoft's exhibit, students visited the final room to see the Salesforce presentation. Salesforce is a cloud-based software company specializing in customer service.
Representatives from Salesforce explained how their AI program builds on data provided by customers or companies to create a smoother and quicker experience when dealing with business-related issues. With Salesforce, students learned about skills that coincide with AI creation and generative AI basics, use the company's Einstein AI, remove bias from user AI and operate the Salesforce data cloud.
The event also included faculty and staff, with workshops on teaching with AI, instruction on Adobe Creative Cloud AI, Microsoft Copilot and the AI basics from Salesforce.
Microsoft representatives told students that Copilot would be available for Auburn Outlook accounts on Feb. 1, but personal Outlook accounts can already use the AI. Students interested in learning more about using Adobe Creative Cloud with Auburn can visit the Provost Office website.
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