Evan Kirstel: Hey everyone, fascinating chat today as we dive into the world of AI and education. Angela, how are you?
Angela Virtu: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me today, Evan.
Kirstel: Thanks for being here. Really excited for this chat around AI, in particular, your role at the Institute of Applied AI. We're going to learn all about what that is, what does the Institute do, and why it was created. First, maybe introductions to yourself, your role as a professor at American University, and a little bit about your career.
Virtu: Great. So again, my name is Angela Virtu. I'm a professor in our business school at American University, where I teach mainly our machine learning, business analytics, and artificial intelligence courses. Before I joined academia and came full time, I actually worked at a whole bunch of startups in the DC metro area, where I was owning and operationalizing all of our machine learning and artificial intelligence products and tools.
Kirstel: Fantastic. And what is the Institute of Applied AI? Sounds like a fascinating entity.
Virtu: So we just launched the Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence this past spring at the university, and we have three core pillars that we are working on doing. The first one is surrounding AI and education, where our goal is to really incorporate and continue infusing it throughout the entire business school curriculum and education through learning outcomes and really making sure that all of our students get AI infused and they're prepared for their future careers. The second pillar of this institute is all about AI research. And then the third pillar is all of our business and policy community engagement pieces. So we're really starting to try to branch out into the greater DC community and even expand the AI exposure on campus, right? So Kogod was one of the first ones to do this AI push. Now we're kind of going to all the other colleges on our campus to make sure that all of our students, regardless of if they're necessarily a business major, has that AI touch.
Kirstel: Brilliant. So you worked in both education and business and industry. How has your industry experience kind of shaped the way you're teaching AI today?
Virtu: So I think there's two key components that have really been helpful in influencing our AI approach. The first one is just industry moves at such a rapid pace, especially when it comes to technologies. And so we've really been able to kind of lean into that agile development and framework and kind of accept, hey, AI is a brand new uncharted territory, especially when we start applying that to our education space. But really, like, let's just roll with it. Let's go really quick and break things as, you know, Mark Zuckerberg always says. So we've really been able to approach that in that manner. And then I think the second thing that's been super helpful is because I come from that business world where I kind of know what artificial intelligence is. I built these tools. I know how they get adopted. We've been able to kind of cut into those more longevity skills, right? We've been able to kind of cut the noise of a lot of the AI tools and different things and really develop on core skills that are going to be helpful to all of the students, regardless of, you know, if they're going to marketing or finance or accounting or whatever their individual discipline is to make sure that they're AI literate and fluent.
Kirstel: Brilliant. And one thing you've said is that AI is more about culture than technology, which I spend most of my time talking about tech on this show. So what do you mean by culture? Why is it so fundamental?
Virtu: Yeah, so I think the interesting thing about artificial intelligence and more specifically, the like generative artificial intelligence is that the way in which we interact with it is very unintuitive, right? The way you actually want to interact with these generative AI technologies is to treat it more like a human, right? But when you pull up on your screen and you just have a little chat box, it feels weird to speak to it like a human. So there's this thing in our brain that's like can't quite process that this should be talked to like an intern or like a peer or like a colleague instead of being like, we need to code or like what's the exact right word to use to get it to do this thing for us. And so I think with that just kind of design thinking, there comes a much larger cultural shift that has to come from the businesses and the organizations to adopt it, right? It's not like we're switching from Tableau to Power BI where you can kind of just plug this thing in and everyone knows what to do. It's just a few changes of buttons. It's really rewiring our brains and kind of having the approach that things that used to be impossible are actually possible now. So that's why I kind of get into it, that cultural shift.
Kirstel: Definitely would agree with you there. And let's talk about how schools are teaching AI firsthand. You can tell us, of course. But what can we learn on teaching AI in academia versus training teams in the enterprise, training people in business, et cetera?
Virtu: So what we're doing at the Kogod School of Business is that we've infused AI into every single class, every single course. That way, every single student, regardless of what their major or minor application is, are going to get these core AI literacy skills. And the interesting thing that we're doing is we're coupling those more technical AI skills along with very human communication skills. So all of our students are going to be able to talk to each other. They're going to be able to collaborate. They're going to be able to communicate. They're going to be able to do those human things that are going to be much, much harder to replicate in a technological sense. And I think the one thing that's been super successful with our AI integration is we've been very community-driven. And that kind of speaks back to that culture piece a little bit, where learning is a very social atmosphere, right?