A close-up photo of the Midjourney homepage, taken with a special camera lens. Midjourney is a form of generative AI for image creation and has played a leading role in the surge of interest in AI over the past two years. Rhode Island College recently formalized an AI degree program to help students master the skills needed to build programs like Midjourney, which rely on large language models, massive data sets used to generate patterns. (Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)
This article is part of an ongoing series on AI in Rhode Island.
A favorite puzzle of philosophers is the cart problem. You can pull a lever and redirect a runaway cart just in time to avoid killing five people – but one person would die on the new track. Do you pull the lever?
On a sunny September morning, small groups of students in a third-floor classroom on the Providence campus of Rhode Island College (RIC) debated a modified trolley problem involving a robot at the switch. They all have the allegorical ‘three laws of robotics”, which banned robots from hurting people. What’s a bot to do when a bloody outcome seems inevitable?
Sonya Cheteyan thought the dilemma wouldn’t be any easier for a machine to handle.
“If it’s impossible for a human, it’s going to be very difficult for an AI to figure it out because AI is just an extension of our intelligence,” said Cheteyan, a RIC junior double major in computer science and AI and a lifelong Providence resident.
“It’s like a combination of everyone’s intelligence wrapped into one entity to make decisions for us. And it’s hard because if we don’t have an answer to that problem, the AI won’t either.”
Cheteyan came across the trolley problem in the course “Application and Impact of AI,” taught by Associate Professor Leonardo Pinheiro. It is one of two courses that integrate ethical detective work into the new RIC course AI curriculumwhich one launched in September.
The bachelor of science program is the first AI-focused bachelor’s degree at a state college in Rhode Island. It aims to prepare students for a workforce where AI is no longer new, said Tim Henry, an associate professor leading the new AI program. This means that we need to teach students not only how to build artificial intelligence, but also how to do it responsibly.
“We’re going to educate students in Rhode Island and help them prepare for the workforce,” Henry said. “Companies are already becoming familiar with the use of AI. The hardest part is understanding how to use it properly, and knowing what the risks are when you use it.”
What students learn in the AI program overlaps and complements the existing computer science major. “[They’re] complementary in a sense, because computer science skills are just as important as knowing how AI models work,” Cheteyan said.
Greater AI literacy is already on the agenda in primary and secondary education, as evidenced by bills such as the LIFT AI Actco-sponsored by Rhode Island Democratic U.S. Representative Gabe Amo and New Jersey Republican Representative Tom Kean Jr. Classes like Pinheiro’s at RIC, meanwhile, help contextualize artificial intelligence for those who are much more likely to enter the workforce. Cheteyan said she didn’t expect to enjoy the course as much as she did.
“He really unfolded everything for me,” she said of Pinheiro. “’I’m like, ‘Oh, AI is more than just ChatGPT.’ It is used in data science. It is used for facial recognition. It was used before it was a popular word… I was surprised how far back it went.”
Let a=4
The AI program is joined by two AI-focused minors and syncs with the school’s Institute for Cybersecurity & Emerging Technologies, which opened last November and will benefit from a voting question approved by 59.7% of voters in the November 5 general election. Voters said yes to a $160.5 million bond issue for capital improvements at RIC and the University of Rhode Island. RIC would use its $73 million share to renovate and modernize Whipple Hall into a dedicated space for the institute, with updated computer labs, data centers, IT infrastructure, classrooms and cyber ranges where students could model threats in real time.
The updated facilities would be vastly different from where Henry typed his first code in 1976: the inside of his high school’s cleaning closet, where he and three fellow students worked at a Teletype terminal connected to the University of Pennsylvania.
“We had to write our first computer program,” Henry said in a recent interview in his office in Alger Hall on the RIC campus. “It was something like, ‘Let a equal four, let b equal five, let c equal a plus b, print c.'”
That was the first point of Henry’s fascination, and his parents gave him a four-function calculator for Christmas. After service in the Coast Guard and a gymnastics career that included two All-American statuses, the professor is in demand these days for his acumen with code.
“Dr. Henry’s record speaks for itself,” said Suzanne Mello-Stark, chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at RIC and a former Ph.D. student of Henry’s at URI.
That’s why RIC has recruited Henry to lead the AI program. Henry is also a member of Governor Dan McKee’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence created by executive order in February and met for the first time in July. The task force is chaired by former U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin, who chairs RIC’s cybersecurity institute. He too wanted Henry on board for the state’s first executive-level initiative on AI, which will ultimately produce a report with findings and recommendations on how the state government can best move forward with AI – a range of technologies billed as both apocalyptic And messianic.
According to Cheteyan, talk about AI can be excessively negative. “There is some foreboding in journalism, for example,” she said, where there are fears that AI could replace or eliminate certain jobs.
But Cheteyan believes AI can be used as a tool for good rather than perishing. “The goal is to learn how to use it and how to benefit from AI, rather than sitting back and saying, ‘Oh, now I’ve lost my job.’ No, we just made your job easier,” she said.
Computers can be artists too
Generative AI has made more people aware of AI’s ability to create songs, images and stories, but this is not always welcome. Just under two years later ChatGPT was born as a refined successor to the chatbots of yesteryearthe hype about generative AI – which creates content – has not yet evaporated. But even a well-trained robot can’t solve everything. What if you ask ChatGPT to “solve the trolley problem”?
“It is unlikely that a robot will completely ‘solve’ the trolley problem because it is fundamentally a matter of moral philosophy and not pure logic,” ChatGPT wrote back when requested.
Henry said the creative possibilities are helping drive much of the interest in AI.
“If you have AI, you can predict your organization’s revenue in two months — okay, great,” Henry said. “That is really interesting for a small, narrow group of people. But if AI can talk to you or generate some text for you, it will be useful for many more people. If it can provide an image for you, it will be useful for many more people.”
Coding, Cheteyan said, is “basically a form of creativity. I know a lot of people say it’s math, but you have to think, you have to come up with good solutions to problems, and you need a creative mind for that.”
Two projects she has coded are a chatbot for the popular messaging app Discord, and a model that analyzes Netflix data to predict a user’s viewing time on a given day. Cheteyan works primarily in the Python programming language, which is “necessary” for many major language models that AI uses, and prioritizes clean and readable code.
According to one of 20 koan-like guidelines known as the Python’s Zen: “Refuse the temptation to guess, despite the ambiguity.”
A job that makes other jobs easier
But there’s still some guesswork about what titles or positions AI majors will hold when they graduate, Henry said.
“It’s a really good question, and everyone’s trying to figure that out,” Henry said. “I can’t necessarily throw out titles, but sometimes it’s ‘computer vision engineer’ or a ‘robotics engineer’ or a ‘natural language processing engineer.’ Those are very specific areas, but generally it will be someone who does machine learning as a software engineer. So software engineering is still the general category.”
Data science is an area where AI is having a noticeable impact, Henry said, because “data analysis and preparation, exploratory data analysis… those kinds of things are the first part of any good AI model, the ability to do those well. ”
He also noted the usefulness of AI in the field of cybersecurity, making it a natural choice for the RIC Institute: “AI tools are very good at understanding and learning from normal network traffic patterns, or behaviors typical of malicious software .”
Cheteyan is also unsure about her exact future, or what job she will ever have, but said she hopes to build “useful tools” like chatbots or use data science to make predictions for companies. She gave the example of sentiment analysisthat sifts through vast amounts of text to talk about certain products, people or companies online.
Cautious optimism surrounds generative AI, recently highlighted by Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook, who called it a “general purpose technology” that could increase productivity, lower inflation and be a boon to the labor market overall, even though that would take time.
A total of 386 students are now taking classes under the AI umbrella through the institute. That number includes a mix of majors, double majors and minors, said Lindsay Russell, a spokesperson for the Institute for Cybersecurity & Emerging Technologies.
An exact number of majors was not yet available, and Henry said the school is still enrolling majors. “Most of the students I know now are people who were here as sophomores and enrolled in an AI major their freshman year,” he added.
This coming semester, Henry will teach an ethics course in AI technologies.
“The bigger problem is understanding how the software can be used outside of what you want to use it for,” says Henry. “That is our ethical responsibility, to look at the data and how we collect data to train it.”
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