Stony Brook University’s College of Business hosted a virtual event through Zoom called: “Artificial Intelligence: Reshaping Learning and Work — Building Human Connections Through Communication” on Tuesday, April 15.
The event was moderated by the Dean of the College of Business, Haresh Gurnani, and covered topics regarding the transformation of the workplace and education by artificial intelligence (AI). He highlighted how Zoom is using AI to enhance collaboration, workflow and accessibility, as well as how AI is being integrated into university systems to support learning and operations.
Velchamy Sankarlingam, the president of Product and Engineering at Zoom and a Stony Brook alumnus who earned his Masters of Science in Business and Policy in 1995, spoke about Zoom’s inclusion of AI tools in its services such as an AI Companion. This tool can automatically summarize notes from a meeting and deliver them to all attendees. Zoom’s Whiteboard feature can quickly create diagrams based on the meeting’s content.
Sankarlingam addressed concerns that AI may depersonalize human interactions in digital communication.
“It is a challenge, and I think sometimes time will tell how the technology will develop, but a lot of the work that AI is doing now actually is assisting you, not replacing you,” Sankarlingam said. “There is always going to be a need for human touch, but there are also inefficiencies that we can remove using AI.”
Gurnani then shifted the conversation to explore potential changes in policy and infrastructure universities may need to adapt to when integrating AI while simultaneously addressing its challenges.
Simeon Ananou, Stony Brook’s Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, specifically mentioned Stony Brook’s investments in AI technology. He noted that graphics processing units (GPU), circuits designed to handle and accelerate tasks related to graphics rendering and processing, were one of these technological investments.
“Our students come to us expecting to be educated in the 21st century on the things that are relevant to them. So they expect the university to make some investments. Stony Brook, like many other large research universities, has made substantial investments in the acquisition of GPUs,” Ananou said.
He then highlighted the need to clarify policies on academic integrity and usage of AI to detect plagiarism.
“With generative AI, it is clear that individuals — whether it is a student or a faculty member — can easily consume data and provide it as part of an assignment,” he said. “Another [area] where institutions have to communicate with their students is whether the institution is in a position to accept AI-detected plagiarism and how to handle that [per their institution’s code of conduct].”
Gurnani then emphasized Stony Brook’s efforts to create more opportunities for students and faculty to use innovations in AI.
“Our location here on Long Island, being close to the city, allows us to offer different types of opportunities to our students [such as] the wonderful process [Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT)] group here on campus and we are asking all our faculty to be going through that training program.”
Ananou explained the partnership between the Division of Information Technology and CELT will help identify staff members who have mastered certain important technological skills and provide them with workshop training so they are able to better integrate AI tools into their curriculum.
Gurnani introduced the final topics by quoting Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, a growing technology company in India. Nilekani said that in the past, technology followed predictable rules, but overtime, this expectation has evolved into allowing machines to make decisions humans typically would.
Sankarlingam responded by comparing AI innovations to the emergence of the internet.
“Before the internet revolution, I never got these scam emails [and] when I was at Stony Brook, my ID number was my social security number. I used to write on [it] all my tests and everything,” Sankarlingam said. “So imagine how the world has changed where that’s now considered a private number. But I think we need to have a framework to guide [AI development] so we are more prepared.”
Afterward, the discussion moved into a Q&A session, where Sankarlingam addressed the additional complexity of verifying information generated by large generative language models like ChatGPT.
“We have this model called a ‘federation,’ which doesn’t just use one [large language model (LLM), but instead] uses multiple LLMs to verify what the other LLM says.”
The event concluded with Sankarlingam thanking Haresh and Simeon for “leading Stony Brook into the AI age.”
Correction Statement: The previous version of this article referred to Nandan Nilekani as Nandan Nila Khani. Additionally, the previous version referred to Dean of the College of Business Haresh Gurnani as Harnish Gurnani. These have since been corrected.
