Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — In an effort to make artificial intelligence resources more accessible to the campus community and increase transparency around the technology, the University of Utah last week launched ai.utah.edu.
"We're looking to mature and grow the website as the university matures and grows its strategies around AI use," Shawn Halladay, associate director for Infrastructure Engineering in the Chief Technology Officer organization, said in a statement. "We really want this to be a collaborative space, where everybody's welcome and all content is relevant."
Halladay said the website will be continuously updated and expanded to ensure it remains relevant as new AI developments emerge.
"This approach will help us keep pace with the rapidly evolving AI landscape at the University of Utah and provide our community with the latest resources and insights," he said.
The website now has a handful of sections, including Learn with AI, Teach with AI, Research with AI, Work with AI, as well as news and support pages.
The website, the university said, is connected to a broader effort to find common ground on how generative AI tools should and shouldn't be used when it comes to working and learning.
That broader effort includes the university in October 2023 launching a $100 million AI research initiative digging into ways AI can be used responsibly to tackle societal issues.
The Responsible AI Initiative is led by Manish Parashar, director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the U., and will look to advance AI in a way that achieves "societal good" while also protecting privacy, civil rights and liberties and promoting principles of accountability, transparency and equity, the university said.
The initiative's initial focus is on three thematic areas that build on the U.'s research strengths: Environment, health care and wellness and teaching and learning.
While AI itself is not an emerging technology, generative AI is. Unlike its predecessors, generative AI has the ability to create content by extrapolating from large sets of data.
"(Generative AI) can do things at scales, at speeds, that we cannot imagine," Parashar said during a recent U Rising podcast. "I see tremendous potential in AI. It does things that humans don't do very well, like assimilate tremendous amounts of data and find patterns quickly. So in that sense, it can really help augment humans, providing them tools that can make them significantly more effective in whatever they do."
The development of the website was led by the the web support and usability team in the U.'s Information Technology department, in consultation with David Hawkins, lead principal DevOps engineer, who curated much of the site's content about Microsoft Copilot, currently the only commercial AI tool sanctioned for use at the university.
"I give (web content specialist Abbey Allen) so much credit," said website services program manager Emily Jacoby. "This was one of her first major website builds, and she took it and ran with it. This was a major project with a lot of moving parts, not to mention that AI is a high-profile, constantly evolving topic. It takes a lot of commitment just to make sure the content is up to date."
"It was a really big collaborative effort," Allen said.
In addition to the website's broader sections, it covers a range of AI-related topics, including:
- Microsoft Copilot information and training.
- Teaching resources on generative AI tools.
- Information on chatbots and prompt literacy.
- AI and AI-adjacent courses and programs at the U.
- Center for High Performance Computing AI and machine learning resources.
- School of Computing AI research areas.
