DeKALB – The second annual Innovation Showcase held Friday featured various presentations, networking opportunities with various industry leaders present and a panel of experts discussing the way forward for artificial intelligence in their industries.
The Innovation Showcase took place from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Engineering Building. The event featured in-depth presentations and exhibits focusing on AI’s role in the future of engineering. The panel, Harnessing AI and Machine Learning, held from 1:15 p.m. to 2:45 p.m., served as a way to promote discussion about artificial intelligence and the role it plays in education as well as ethical considerations in its implementation.
Dean of NIU’s College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, Dave Grewell, opened the event with remarks followed by short presentations from the CEET Department and program leaders, including electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial and systems engineering, engineering technology, biomedical engineering and mechatronics engineering.
The event, co-hosted by CEET and the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center included a panel of experts gathered in the Kasuba Auditorium to discuss the integration of AI into various areas of society, such as engineering, manufacturing and education as a whole.
Among the panel was Scott Meyer, Chipp co-founder, Greg McFalls, founder of McFalls Technical Solutions, Brian Freeman, senior data scientist at TraneTechnologies, and Kristy Schomaker, North America Digital Services Commercialization Leader at Trane Commercial.
Meyer described his company as an artificial intelligence chatbot building platform which helps businesses with AI integration.
“You don’t need to know code and can build AI tools and connect it to your own software. We have about 7,000 users that are using that and have served over a million chats to people around businesses, mostly,” Meyer said.
Meyer explained the purpose of AI in the workforce.
“You can think of people who have laborious tasks that they need to do more quickly,” Meyer said. “I always say AI is great at what you hate and what we’re trying to do is figure out what things are in your day that you don’t want to do and is not a great use of skills. Let’s get those out of the way so you can spend time doing what you care about.”
McFalls explained the role his company plays.
“For me to compete with bigger companies doing what I do, machine learning, AI, generative AI, especially nowadays, is how I compete. It allows me to create solutions that work really well, really quickly, faster than anybody else, so long as I use the technology in a responsible way,” McFalls said.
Freeman discussed the kinds of skill sets he was looking for in graduates interested in working with AI.
“Data collection: being able to collect the right data at the right time with the right necessary metadata associated with it,” Freeman said. “Data clarity: being able to search for it, have it, and you have it in a reputable and confident way for historical access. Data analysis: making sure you’re able to interpret that data set. Prompt engineering: be able to write solid prompts to be able to collect the information from some type of agent because most likely, whatever tool you’re using is gonna have embedded AI going forward. It’s just the way things are working.”
The question of whether or not AI would negatively impact critical thinking skills among prospective engineers was presented, as in the case of ChatGPT being used to solve homework.
“I come at it as a teaching problem. I think if you’re giving questions that students can use AI to solve, you should be teaching differently,” Meyer said.
Schomaker addressed some ethical concerns raised about the use of AI, particularly around the uncertainty and fear of AI replacing people’s jobs.
“We’re gonna consistently need to think of different approaches on how we maintain a culture of wanting to grow and apply our skill sets and think that we have a career path in front of us,” Schomaker said.
The event concluded at 3 p.m., but a lunch took place at 5 p.m. for those who signed up in advance.
