From idea to impact: ASU’s IT professional community gathers to demonstrate AI in action

From personalized learning assistants, course builders and degree recommendations — the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to guide the academic journey is becoming a reality.

Jonathan Crowell

May 20, 2024

On Wednesday, May 15, over 500 IT professionals, technologists, and visionaries from across Arizona State University (ASU) convened to explore the implementation of AI – from idea to impact. Now in its seventh year, the annual IT professional community event is known as Empower.

“We’re committed to our charter, to continue keeping ASU at the cutting edge of research, teaching and learning,” said ASU Chief Information Officer Lev Gonick during his introductory remarks. “We’re committed to innovation in using emerging technologies to help our students succeed, and you are all the force, the differentiators and the vanguard behind how we can harness this technology now to help us shape the future together.”

ASU reflects on first semester with Open AI partnership via ABC15 Arizona

AI: From idea to impact

Among the event’s highlights included demonstrations of AI-powered experiences to help guide the academic journey. Three teams took the stage to demonstrate AI in action.

MyAI Builder
Presented by Executive Director Elizabeth Reilly and AI Program Manager Ayat Sweid from ASU’s AI Acceleration

Engineers, data scientists and AI specialists from the AI Acceleration team have been working to create a suite of products that allows teams from across the university to create their own custom AI experiences.

At Empower, the team introduced a first look at MyAI Builder, a tool designed to help make building custom AI experiences easy for everyone. Users can develop a custom AI experience in as few as three steps. And with over 20 large language models available, MyAI Builder offers a range of models from top industry leaders, including OpenAI, Amazon Web Services, Google and Meta.

Learn more about MyAI Builder

Degree Recommendation Engine (DRE)
Presented by Jordan Hendrickson, product manager at EdPlus

With over 900 degree options available, ASU offers a wide range of academic journeys. The team at EdPlus are working on an AI-powered tool that helps students navigate their degree options, using their interests and career aspirations. The Degree Recommendation Engine – known as DRE – asks users a variety of questions to better understand student wants and needs to effectively recommend viable degree path options.

Learning Task Generation System for ASU for Life
Presented by Turner Bohlen, head of product at Learning Enterprise

The Learning Enterprise at ASU is focused on supporting learners across their lifetimes. And for these learners who may not necessarily be seeking a degree, some AI-powered guidance could help. The tool features accelerated course building, a chatbot to engage and converse with users about individual career enhancement needs and options along with AI ticket management to support ticket system generation for ongoing conversations with learners.

ASU faculty and students showcase the use of AI for teaching and learning

The AI Innovation Showcase invited faculty and students from across five of the university’s schools and colleges to take the stage to demonstrate the use of generative AI tools to enhance experiences in teaching and learning.

Check out a few highlights from the presentations:

Writing smarter, not harder: Assistant Professor Jake Greene and two graduate students Stephanie Leow and Amber Hedquist explained their use of generative AI to support scholarly writing last semester. The team was granted access to ChatGPT Enterprise as part of the spring 2024 AI Innovation Challenge.

Building custom GPTs: Mihir Parmar is a graduate student in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. During his presentation, he shared how users would be able to train their GPTs for broader applications like legal and clinical reasoning, and even for the accomplishment of daily tasks as simple as laundry.
Language Buddy: Dr. Christiane Reves, assistant teaching professor in the School of International Letters and Cultures, explored the development of an AI-powered “language buddy” to help students learning a second language. Free speaking is an important component and leveraging ChatGPT Enterprise, the team is developing the Language Buddy to develop conversational skills that are creative and not rigidly scripted.
AI for storytelling: Dr. Retha Hill teaches in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. For the past two semesters, her course has tasked students with creating immersive media experiences using tools like generative AI and virtual reality.
Faculty course and support: Jonathan McMichael and Kristen Peña from the Learning & Teaching Hub at Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering are working on a course design project. They are building five custom GPTs that interact with each other, using a list of topics and topic-based assistants. The project is part of the spring 2024 AI Innovation Challenge.
GenAI in Education: Punya Mishra from Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College presented the idea of an AI playground for college educators, decision-makers, teachers, and students to explore AI applications, programs, strategies, and resources. “If we want to make systemic change happen, it cannot happen just by supporting individuals. You have to support broader teams and groups within the colleges and across the university,” asserted Mishra.

Kyle Bowen from ASU Enterprise Technology hosted the day-long event.

Inspired by the various use cases of AI already underway, attendees broke out into teams to develop their own AI-enabled solutions during the second part of the day.

A total of 48 teams were organized around a persona, tasked with creating an AI-solution to support creativity and efficiency. The teams were all granted access to ChatGPT Enterprise to complete their activity.

Amanda Federico, Jesus Franco Yescas, Bea Rodriguez-Fransen, Jodi Menees, Scott Pennelly and Jennifer Tweedy of team NextAI took home the top prize — one year of access to CharGPT Enterprise — for their project idea FlexiLearn. The AI-powered personalized learning platform would aim to make education more differentiated and self-determined for students.

Each year, Empower gathers the IT community at ASU for a day of connection, collaboration and creativity.