AI Innovation Challenge Prepares Students for Workforce by Increasing Knowledge of AI and Promoting AI Equity

November 8, 2024

More than 100 Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) students and mentors from a variety of academic majors filled the 13th floor conference rooms at Fiterman Hall November 1 and 2 for the Fall 2024 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation Challenge for Social Good. This is the second AI Innovation Challenge and the first to be held for two days. BMCC hosted the first AI Innovation Challenge during the Spring 2024 semester.

Students at AI ChallengeHeaded by Computer Information Systems (CIS) Department Professor, Dr. Mohammad Azhar, the recurring large-scale experiential learning event encourages students to work in teams and innovate projects which apply AI to address social challenges at BMCC, the greater community, and globally. 

“We have to prepare our students for this new age where AI will be playing a major role in many jobs and positions,” said Dr. Azhar who says he would like to make the event CUNY-wide.  “The goal of events such as this is to prepare them now so when they look for jobs, they’ll have the skills to get hired and promote AI Equity.”

 The organizing team members led by Dr. Azhar include CIS Professors Louise Yan and Younes Benkarroum as well as Social Sciences, Criminal Justice and Human Services Professor Rifat Salam.  Other team members include BMCC Alumnus Andrew Rubinstein (winner of the first BMCC Hackathon), Eslem Varank (a winner at the  Fall 2023 STEM Innovation Challenge), and other Tech Industry Advisors

Dr. Azhar says the AI Innovation Challenge, much like industry Hackathons, is part of the technology learning continuum that will continue in the workplace.  

“In the world of tech, it’s a life of life-long learning, because things are changing every day,” said Dr. Azhar. “The idea is to be a problem-solver.  You need to know how to learn new things and those are the human things the machine doesn’t know how to do yet.”

Participants in the AI Innovation Challenge incorporate AI in BMCC Social Good projects with themes such as zero hunger, environmental sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion, accessible education, health and wellness, housing, new student community, misinformation and disinformation and increasing diversity in STEM fields. 

Students on each team worked in one of three tracks—open source AI Innovation, AI & data  science Innovation and AI Innovation–depending on their command of AI.

“For instance, a student studying video arts can use AI in the editing process,” said Dr. Azhar. “This event helps unleash the student’s mind, it gets them excited about making change.”

Students with professor at AI ChallengeSpecifically, each team’s members formulate and finalize ideas and apply AI to their projects including writing programming code, designing websites, and creating PowerPoint and video presentations which they present to a panel of industry professional judges on the final night of the event.

In addition to gaining valuable feedback from the judges, team members who have worked on winning projects become eligible for internships at Dr. Azhar’s AI Tech Equity Innovation hub

Developing robust applications utilizing AI towards AI Equity

By mid-afternoon on the first day of the event, students sitting around large round tables were working on laptops as the sound of fingers pecking keyboards permeated the constant hum of quiet conversation happening between teammates. 

All the while, around 25 tech industry professional volunteers from companies including Cloud Native Computing Foundation,  Google, JP Morgan, All Tech is Human and IBM circled the room offering guidance and insight. The students would finish out the day around 9 p.m. and return back to the tasks at hand the next morning at 8 a.m.  

In his team’s effort to bring about more diversity among STEM majors, Computer Information Systems major, Smedly Moise, and his teammates were focused on developing a live chat bot for the BMCC website that answers questions and provides helpful information.

“A lot of students during their first semester aren’t aware of some of the services or options available to them; this chat bot can help them find answers,” explained Moise. “Members of my team work on the data to prove our solution is proven by data while I’m working on the chat box, trying to include information that a student may want answers to.”

Moise says the two-day event gives students time to really think and come up with a robust application and see how the implementation of AI can make that tool even better.

BMCC alumnus Ashraful Mahin (CIS’24) who is now at Hunter College says he probably wouldn’t have pursued AI as a concentration in college were it not for attending the first BMCC AI Innovation Challenge last semester.  Mahin participated as a mentor for second AI Innovation Challenge

“The AI Challenge forced me to do something new,” said Mahin. “For the first time, I worked with Google Gemini, and at first I didn’t know what I was doing, but after three hours of debugging, coding and going at it straight, I got my code to work, which was the best part.”

AI can be a helpful tool

The advent of AI has generated much excitement but also a virtual tsunami of concern about what it can and will be able to do in the future.  That’s not lost on Dr. Azhar or his students, who all note that AI tools, such as Alexa or Siri have been around for many years now.

The capabilities of generative AI applications, which can create new content, such as human-like text, images, or computer code based on what it has learned from past data, are expanding at a rapid rate. 

“We have to take AI and teach it to do good things for humanity,” said CIS major Moise. “AI can be a helpful tool, just like calculators are helpful tools, AI can actually improve society in a lot of ways.”

Dr. Azhar says it’s understandable why people are sometimes uneasy about AI’s capabilities.

“We don’t know what it’s capable of,” said Dr. Azhar.  “AI has its own mind now. Billions of dollars are being spent to make it even smarter.”   

He said as AI gets smarter and smarter, disinformation and misinformation will continue to be one of the world’s greatest challenges. 

“Our students will be the ones to come up with a solution to solve this problem,” said Dr. Azhar. “We have to make certain our students understand AI’s capabilities.”

Presentation winners

The overwhelming participation of women in this event shows promise for the future representation in the field as women remain underrepresented in technology fields and computing majors. The first-place winners of the highly competitive AI Innovation Track was an all-woman team of students: Darlyn Gomez, Nuria Siddiqa, Yangmei Lu, Mekhribon Yusufbekova.

Read about the winning projects.  AI Innovation track winners hereAI and Data Science track winners here. Open Source AI Innovation track winners here.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

    • Students work in teams using AI to solve social challenges and advance AI Equity
    • Students from any academic major can participate
    • Final team projects judged by industry professionals

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