20 Custom AI Class Projects – No Programming Required!

The University of Florida (UF) is positioned to become a national leader in artificial intelligence (AI) research, teaching, and application.

As part of this vision, all of UF’s colleges are exploring innovative ways to incorporate AI throughout their curriculum. However, many UF students and faculty do not have any experience in computer programming and are unsure how best to take part in this major AI push.

CogAbility

For help with both AI brainstorming and classroom implementation, UF professors can now work with the AI engineering firm CogAbilityⓇ to explore creative ways to give students hands-on experience with the latest AI technology. Founder and UF alumnus, Jim Hoskins, and his CogAbility AI engineers are working with UF professors from the various colleges to explore how best to infuse AI into any UF course by leveraging a private virtual software environment known as the CogUniversity UF Campus.

UF Students Become “Professors” and Train Their Own “CogBots”

CogUniversity is the world’s first university dedicated to teaching AI machines rather than humans. And UF is the first university in the world to have its own private campus of CogUniversity. The “students” at CogUniversity are custom AI creatures known as “CogBotsⓇ.” In the same way, a human student can choose from many different majors at UF, a CogBot can “major” in any field of study at the CogUniversity UF Campus and learn to do anything that today’s AI technology can do.

UF is the first university in the world to have its own private campus of CogUniversity.UF professors and CogAbility AI engineers collaborate to develop a custom CogBot tailored for a specific UF class. This CogBot is then trained by UF students in the context of the class topic. Students gain hands-on, industry-specific experience with real-world AI technology from CogAbility, the open-source community, Google, IBM, and others in the context of their specific field of study without the need for any programming.

Industry-exclusive CogUniversity UF Campus features such as AutoBoardingⓇ are integrated with UF systems, greatly simplifying classroom management for UF professors. And since the student project CogBots can be funded by UF Material & Supply fees or grants, college/departments need only fund a small, one-time setup fee to get started.

Initial Use Cases – “Alli” and “Cammy”

The first CogBot built and managed at the CogUniversity UF Campus is “Alli Gator.” Alli is a student-facing Conversational CogBot (i.e. virtual agent) majoring in “UF Operations” at CogUniversity. All UF students can access Alli on various UF websites or via text messaging. Alli will answer questions of all kinds for prospective, current, and former UF students and their families. A multidisciplinary team of UF students and faculty spanning over a dozen university departments collaborate at the CogUniversity UF Campus to train, monitor, and optimize Alli over time. Alli is poised to become the new “face of AI” at UF. She is also the first AI Teaching Assistant in UF’s history.

Another CogBot named “Cammy” is a hands-on AI class project custom-built for UF students enrolled in the course EEL3872, “Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals.” Cammy majors in “Sea Turtle Conservation” at the CogUniversity UF Campus. In the Sea Turtle AI Class Project, the UF students become “Student Professors” at CogUniversity and teach Cammy by building and integrating three different types of machine learning models on UF’s HiperGator supercomputer without any programming:

1. Answer basic questions about sea turtles (natural language processing)
2. Determine the species of a sea turtle in an image (image classification)
3. Predict the weight of a sea turtle given species and dimensions (linear regression)

At each step, Cammy guides the students as they join a fictitious sea turtle conservation team led by a cranky marine biologist named Dr. Harris. UF students do not need any AI or programming experience to complete this class project because Cammy guides them through the process and answers their questions. PHOTO 5***

The student’s feedback has been excellent:

At the UF College of Health & Human Performance, students teach another CogBot named “Katherine” to determine the likely outcome of a baseball pitch based on its metrics. As the narrative goes, UF student professors help coach Fuller find the best pitchers for the UF baseball team – no AI or programming experience necessary.

The CogUniversity UF Campus is a technology-agnostic, open platform, providing a central, collaborative teaching platform allowing a diverse set of UF students and faculty to build and manage a growing fleet of CogBots that will accelerate AI education, research, and production applications at UF.

How to Get Started

UF Faculty can schedule a free AI consultation to explore ways to infuse AI into their classes by contacting Dr. Hans Van Oostrom (oostrom@ufl.edu) or Jim Hoskins at CogAbility (jimh@cogability.com).

About CogAbility

CogAbility is an AI engineering firm dedicated to accelerating the deployment of responsible AI for the benefit of people, organizations, and the planet. We leverage the best AI technology from CogAbility, the open-source community, our partners IBM, Google, Amazon, and others to help organizations leverage AI in exciting new ways.

Founder, CEO, and UF engineering alumnus, Jim Hoskins, was an early pioneer in the application of machine learning to solve real-world problems. He was on the IBM team that developed next-generation avionics for the NASA Space Shuttle cockpit, including speech recognition technology. He was also part of the IBM Personal Computer development team working with top machine learning research labs in New York, Paris, and London. Jim has authored over 40 books on the application of technology, including the Exploring IBM series, which sold over 350,000 copies in 12 languages.

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This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by CogAbility at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which CogAbility operates. The features and performance data discussed herein are presented as derived under specific operating conditions. Actual implementation and results may vary.

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