TRU sets the direction for AI utilization
Photo: Castanet
File – Names of students attending lectures in classrooms on the Thompson Rivers University campus.
Thompson Rivers University believes that artificial intelligence is here to stay, and our goal is to be a leader in implementing technology responsibly and ethically.
Andrea Lee told Castanet Kamloops. She joined the university in November as special advisor to the president on AI. This position was created after Dr. Irini became TRU's chancellor over the summer.
Lee's job is to guide the university's AI strategy, including identifying applications. She said she spent the first month collecting data from more than 400 students, staff and faculty to gauge sentiment.
“Overall, people at TRU are cautiously optimistic, which is great because it means people understand that AI is here to stay and there are opportunities everywhere,” she said.
“At least as an executive team, we're always talking about the concept of responsible AI adoption, so it's important that we clearly define what that is in terms of where we go next.”
Already in use
TRU President Airini said that in preparing for the interview with Castanet, he combined media briefings with other documents and used Microsoft's AI CoPilot to generate possible answers to questions that might come up during the interview.
“But in the end, in the end, in the end, [Castanet] “I sat down with Andrea and Irini and what's coming out at this point is completely human,” Irini said.
“AI will augment our intelligence, not replace it. And it will free us, as humans, from repetitive tasks and actually allow us to do more human-to-human tasks.”
AI is currently being used by TRU faculty, researchers, and some staff to assist in their daily tasks.
Lee said he has identified about 24 faculty members who are “leading a lot of AI research,” many of them in the College of Science.
Their projects range from salmon monitoring, medical patient simulation, and predictive analytics for environmental monitoring and transportation planning. A master's student is developing a tool to automatically aggregate statistics for the WolfPack women's volleyball team.
A committee was also established to develop a new master's program in AI.
Although TRU has not developed a specific policy to address the use of AI at universities, it has approved changes to its academic integrity policy to classify unauthorized use of AI in classes as a new type of violation. Airini said TRU's policies are “stable.”
Mr Lee said transparency and clarity are paramount when using AI, and some university documents now have an icon to indicate whether AI was used in their creation.
Coming to terms with AI
Two new AI data centers are currently under construction on TRU's campus in collaboration with Bell.
Lee said the infrastructure will empower TRU students, researchers and faculty by accelerating research, increasing AI fluency and supporting “students looking to start their own entrepreneurial companies.”
He said there are also opportunities for TRU to leverage AI to make its operations more efficient.
“Like manual processes that take a lot of time, imagine if we could leverage technology, not just AI, to be a little more efficient going forward,” Lee said.
TRU's working group is currently considering how to responsibly incorporate AI into the classroom.
Airini described AI as a tool used to improve processes and likened it to innovations such as the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet.
“Right now we're coming to terms with another piece of work that we've created,” she said.
“What we have now is an opportunity to move from perhaps a reactive mode to a mode of being proactive and forming our own version of what it means to be an AI university.”
