Grace Tarlyon is preparing to graduate from the WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics with expertise in supply chain management, data analytics, and applied AI. (WVU Photo/Zakaria Issa)
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INot one of her supply chain classes west virginia universityGrace Tarlyon toured Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Putnam County.
“At Toyota, I got to see all the artificial intelligence capabilities that the company has and all the different bots that are running around. Toyota is such a big company that the impact of those technologies should be huge. I had never seen anything like that. It was really cool,” she said.
“When it comes to AI, the industry looks very different than it did just three years ago. AI is complex and we need to think carefully and adapt. Robots are now working in factories, minimizing human risk and injury and increasing efficiency. AI is not going away. is something we have to accept, and that starts with finding the most efficient way to use it. So I decided to take a class to understand how it actually works.”
Grace Tarlyon, a senior supply chain management major at WVU, is expanding her academic interests through coursework in data analytics and applied artificial intelligence. (WVU Photo/Zakaria Issa)
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Tarlyon, a Wisconsin native, chose WVU for the rowing opportunity. Now a fourth-year student scheduled to graduate in May, she serves as one of the rowing team’s conductors, or “the brains of the boat.”
“I love coaching rowing and I really enjoy the guys I’m on the team with. We’re a very unique group. People who work in rowing tend to be mentally tough because it’s so demanding.”
Tarlion likes challenges both on and off the water, she said. She came to WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics with a strong interest in supply chains, but no experience as a programmer or working with data. But she broadened her interests when a faculty mentor in the Department of Management Information Systems and Supply Chain encouraged her to explore a minor in data analytics.
Grace Tarlyon, one of the conductors on the WVU rowing team, coaches her crew in strategy, communication and split-second decision-making on the water. (Submitted photo)
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“For me, the most interesting part of data analysis is the coding,” Terlion says. “It’s very satisfying to finally be able to run the code. Finding a bug and then making it work can be finicky and difficult, so I think it’s fun.”
As Terlion explored the world of coding and data, she was drawn to an innovative course taught by Bin Liu, an associate professor in the newly launched WVU Chambers College program in Applied AI and Data Analytics.
“Grace took my AI and machine learning class, which starts with more traditional machine learning, moves into deep learning, and finally goes into large-scale fundamental models,” Liu said.
“Students are always excited about generative AI like ChatGPT, but I ask them to go back and master the basic concepts of machine learning. ChatGPT is great, but what if you have data that you can’t share due to security concerns? In that case, you need to train the machine learning model yourself, and you need to understand the steps that led to today’s AI technology.”
Tarlyon said she found Liu’s class “fascinating” because it gave her behind-the-scenes access to the mysteries of deep learning models.
Grace Tarlyon, WVU Chambers College Supply Chain Management senior graduate (WVU Photo/Zakaria Issa)
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“Bin showed us how deep learning libraries actually work and the range of lines of code,” Tarlyon said. “It was shocking to me to see that the platform had multiple ‘hidden layers’ for training, and that there could be hundreds of layers behind a single deep neural network model.”
Under Liu’s supervision, Terlion quickly began building machine learning models to predict home prices in the Pittsburgh area.
“There were 79 variables, ranging from the number of bedrooms and bathrooms to square footage to whether there was an attached garage,” she explained. “The skills I learned could be extremely useful to companies like Ebara Elliott Energy, where I interned in Pittsburgh, where they use AI and are working to understand and scale AI across the company.”
“In my opinion, expertise in AI should be a must for business students, because the biggest concern with AI right now is that we misuse it, think of it as a colleague rather than a tool, and let it make decisions for us. But I’ve definitely sat in AI classes at WVU thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be useful in my job.'” I’m excited to be able to put what I’ve learned to use. ”
Tarion during his trip to Florence, Italy (posted photo)
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That’s the idea, Liu said, and that’s what sets WVU’s AI program apart.
“At Chambers, we focus on real-world applications of AI,” Liu says. “Students have the opportunity to learn AI and data science, be part of Data Driven West Virginia, and collaborate with industry partners. This is very different from, say, a computer science program, where you dig deeper into different algorithms. But our students, like Grace, are more focused on problem-solving.”
Tarlyon said her professional goal is to continue exploring the field that struck her as a student.
“I want to focus on working with supply chain datasets in my career. I really fell in love with working with data at WVU, not just coding. For me, where I got better at programming languages was when I started understanding the background of the code and what the platform needed instead of trying to memorize everything. That really helped me. And that’s what I enjoyed,” she said.
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