The University hosted a three-day event starting Nov. 13 called AI Live, which highlighted UT’s advancements in artificial intelligence and celebrated the end of UT’s Year of AI.
The program was a “celebration and symposium” of AI featuring speakers, panels and live demonstrations. It also highlighted AI’s role in daily life, according to a College of Natural Sciences press release.
The panel “From Classrooms to College Sports: Leveraging Psychology and AI to Empower Gen Z” discussed how AI could provide feedback on crisis text lines and school assignments more successfully than some humans.
Psychology professor David Yeager said by training AI models to extract the best features of crisis text line answers, the models could potentially provide feedback better than the average person. However, he said AI would not replace human expertise, but could instead discern patterns in human experts and reproduce them more efficiently.
“It’s not replacing humans with robots,” Yeager said. “(It’s) more like an Iron Man suit.”
Assistant baseball coach Max Weiner said AI can be used to compile data on previous baseball pitches to learn exactly what pitches will help a team in future games.
“I use these models to take data that would just be too time-consuming to look through, and provide players with hope … and ideally, the developmental pathway moving forward,” Weiner said.
The “AI For All: Navigating Accessibility Issues” panel explored the ways in which AI can help with accessibility.
Graduate student Jaxsen Day said there are many workarounds he uses AI for, such as providing general information about a web page, spotting grammatical errors and converting inaccessible documents into usable ones.
“This technology is so very advanced that if you can find ways to incorporate it into your workflow, you can save a lot of time,” Day said.
John Neumann, an associate professor at the School of Information, said AI needs to be embraced and used in education. These tools are already improving classroom accessibility, he said.
“We build AI companions for the Canvas courses,” Neumann said. “We build AI companions for research documents … AI is going to be (a) game changer.”
