Artificial Intelligence has been around for a considerable time, so business owners and the workforce have to catch up. At Florida State College at Jacksonville’ s Bean Technical Career Center last week, professors explained the tool’ s variety of uses, AI’ s origins and the tool’ s functions on a granular level. Community members and business owners were asking...
Artificial Intelligence has been around for a considerable time, so business owners and the workforce have to catch up.
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FSCJ Dean of Information Technology Sha’Kia Riggins started the six-hour workshop. She was the first professor to teach an Introduction to AI course at FSCJ last semester.
“The students did not want the class to end,” Riggins said. “They want to learn it, buť they want to learn it the right way, so they can actually use it.”
AI, generally, is selflearning software pulling from databases to assist with a task. It can mimic behavior, and it wants to get to know us better, Riggins said.
Using AI is far more complex than copying and pasting a question and receiving an answer. Riggins focuses on prompt engineering, feeding the AI information gathered by the student and getting a more precise prompt.
Riggins told the room she wrote her wedding vows with AI. It can write emails, plan trips or design a garden.
“It’s here to enhance what you already know, not replace you,” Riggins said.
Riggins wanted the workshop attendees to learn what AI is and how to use it.
“For me, it doesn’t matter the industry you’re in, I can teach you how to leverage it in your job,” Riggins added.
Professor of Cybersecurity Cecile Washington’s portion of the workshop was on natural language processing for algorithms and data acquisition. He detailed how to use chatboxes to help small businesses become more efficient. It can improve customer experience and cybersecurity.
“Everybody was asking for my phone number,”
Natural language processing can be used for accounting assistance, or to ease the supply chain. Social media can be handled with the right AI prompts.
“I talked about how AI could help them with a marketing strategy or financial overview to make everything easier within their organization,”
Al-Zaidy said he fielded questions on cybersecurity and how AI can protect information online.
His talk was about data-centric AI vS. modelcentric AI. He explained Generative AI, which creates content based on the dataset it’s given. Getting the right outcome requires feeding correct data in an ample quantity to establish “trust” with the AI.
“If we have a weak model, are using incorrect code or an algorithm that isn’t strong, then we will not have an outcome we want to achieve,” Al-Zaidy said. “In addition to the model, you have the data. We need to ensure the data is good and accurate.”
Attendees pushed for more AI training in the future, and the chamber will plan more AI-related training.
‘We walked away with the needs of our members, and we’re acting upon that,” she said.
Duncan said the event started with the prominence of AI in the workplace and the need to establish a foundation in the technology with the business community. The Chamber went to FSCJ due to its curriculum. The hands-on nature of the event impressed her.
‘We can all sit through Zoom presentations and things, but to actually get hands-on experience was really important, especially for some in there that had never experienced anything AI-related or realized they were working with it,” Duncan said. nblank@bnewsleader.com
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