By Paul Guzzo, University Communications and Marketing
As an assistant professor with the University of South Florida’s School of Information Systems and Management in the Muma College of Business, Triparna de Vreede’s current research focuses on employee interaction with artificial intelligence in the workplace.
“How does someone respond to AI? How does AI change their behavior?” de Vreede said. “I look at how AI can be designed so that we have the best work performance.”
When USF's College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing launches this fall, de Vreede plans to remain with the Muma College of Business while also participating in the new college. She expects that the new college will enhance her work and that her work will enhance the new college — the first of its kind in Florida and one of the few like it in the country.
USF Provost and Executive Vice President Prasant Mohapatra [Photo by Clifford McBride, University Communications and Marketing]
“That is the best piece of the new college,” de Vreede said. “It has an interdisciplinary nature that will foster collaboration throughout USF.”
The new college will produce job-ready professionals in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and computing. It will also boost disciplines across all USF colleges while producing a new type of 21st-century graduate who can leverage artificial intelligence to enhance their work.
“The College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing provides opportunities for all of our colleges and disciplines to cross academic boundaries and to tackle complex challenges," said USF Provost and Executive Vice President Prasant Mohapatra, whose research includes how AI can track online social network trends. "This is where scholars from nursing, business, ethics, the arts and more can leverage technological advances, especially related to AI."
To foster university-wide collaborations, the new college will use a “hub-and-spoke model,” said interim Dean Sudeep Sarkar, whose research focuses on computer vision, which is a field of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process and analyze visual data.
Disciplines at the center of the college, or the hub, concentrate on foundational research. The hub will be made up of the disciplinary majors of computer science, cybersecurity, information technology and artificial intelligence.
The spokes are specialized areas of study. To start, business, criminology and social sciences will make up the spokes through classes offered through each subject’s respective college.
Students will seek ways to use the hub’s disciplines to improve the work being done in the spokes’ specialties.
Sarkar anticipates that the college will eventually offer interdisciplinary majors in computer science in combination with one of those specialties. For example, a student could receive a bachelor's degree in computer science and social sciences.
“The idea is that the students can be hired by a tech firm that doesn’t specialize in their interdisciplinary field,” Sarkar said. “But the students will learn how to leverage computer science and artificial intelligence to improve work in the interdisciplinary field.”
How do the hub and spokes come together?
Examples:
- Social sciences involve the study of groups of people and how they interact. Fake news and doctored photographs can influence groups. Artificial intelligence can trace trends to learn who is most influenced and why. It can also provide technology that can help decipher what is fake.
- Psychology and artificial intelligence can come together through effective computing, which is technology that can recognize and respond to human emotions. By analyzing a person’s mood based on what they type, effective computing is already used by some websites and apps, like those that concentrate on customer service or mental health counseling.
- In business, the artificial intelligence tools of eye-tracking technology and facial expression sensors can monitor participants’ responses as they watch videos and then use that information to tell advertisers whether viewers are interested in the message.
In the future, such technology will be more widespread and advanced, Sarkar said. “A room will be sensitive to your mood. If you are feeling down, the room will know and can play music that will bring you out of it or change the lighting in a way that can. You will need to understand psychology and AI to make that perfect.”
The Behavioral AI Lab has artificial intelligence tools of eye-tracking technology and facial expression sensor. [Photo by Cassidy Delamarter, University Communications and Marketing]
USF currently has such technology in its Behavioral AI Lab. Directed by de Vreede and dedicated to advancing the understanding of artificial intelligence's role in influencing and interpreting human behavior within business contexts, the lab is a joint initiative between the School of Information Systems and Management and the School of Marketing and Innovation.
“We share resources because they can be used for research in both disciplines, and we figured, why buy two sets of eye trackers?” de Vreede said. “There will be more collaborations like this when we have the new college.”
Artificial intelligence is already being used in classes in the USF Department of Criminology, where Professor George Burruss and students are developing an AI-powered chatbot to assist law enforcement and educate cyber scam victims, particularly senior citizens. Inside the Cybercrime Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Lab, which involves understanding human behavior and its interaction with technology in committing a crime, they are training the chatbot to provide actionable guidance in real-time to prevent people from falling victim to online scams.
However, not all professors have the expertise to develop their own technology. That is where the new college can step in.
“Collaborations will be everywhere, even outside the disciplinary areas,” Sarkar said. “One college will identify a problem that they would like technology to help solve. Our college can research and develop that technology.”
Interim Dean Sudeep Sarkar [Photo by Cassidy Delamarter, University Communications and Marketing]
If needed, both colleges can also team with behavioral artificial intelligence researchers who can “identify a human-centric design,” de Vreede said. “It is a trifecta.”
That original college can then “teach students how to use that technology to enhance their work,” Sarkar said, “whether that is in health, business, archaeology, architecture or you name it.”
That issue of how to use artificial intelligence to enhance work rather than replace people will become a university-wide initiative led by the new college.
“The most powerful AI isn’t the kind that replaces human effort — it’s the kind that enhances it," Sarkar said. "AI should be ambient, working in the background to support creativity rather than overshadow it. Take writing, for example. If AI writes a story for you, the result might be mediocre at best. But if AI helps you brainstorm, refine ideas or uncover new perspectives, the final work – crafted by you – can be truly exceptional.”
At some point, artificial intelligence in the classroom will be no different than students using laptops to take notes, as compared to when they once used pen and paper, de Vreede said. “Microsoft Word made life easier. Now USF is at the forefront of helping students understand AI, the advantages of collaborating with it and its limitations.”
There might not be any limitations to the growth of the College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing. As collaborations between it and the other 13 colleges grow, more multidisciplinary majors might be added, which would lead to more groundbreaking research.
“USF is being bold about putting this front and center and allowing it to disperse across the campus,” Sarkar said. “There are many possibilities, and we’ll let it grow organically. This is just the starting point.”