Scott Rex spoke yesterday during a Wisconsin Technology Council meeting in Wauwatosa, where he and other panelists discussed the work of the institute and where it’s headed. Since launching in 2018 as a partnership between the Milwaukee-based insurer, UW-Milwaukee and Marquette University, it has received about $75 million in funding.
The group has been putting those funds toward research and innovation, aligning educational programs with business needs and more. Due to its focus on data science, the rapidly growing field of AI is a major focus for its efforts, according to Rex.
“Marquette’s campus, as well as UWM, we don’t really have an understanding of how we’re going to play with AI,” he said. “So one of the roles I think NMDSI can play is bringing together all of the folks who have opinions and are using AI, and get some common practices together.”
This fall, the institute aims to create a forum to bring together faculty across various disciplines, including traditional STEM fields as well as others, he said.
“We do want to be aware that AI is not the only area of focus that we have,” he said. “There’s a lot of machine learning work that we do, coordinated science work that we do, but AI certainly is what’s captured the students’ interest and we need to get ahead of that.”
Jonathan Stark, the institute’s executive director, says partners are “putting some wheels in motion to increase our footprint.” The NMDSI last year supported funding for several new courses to expand data science learning opportunities.
“We really want data science training and AI training to hit every student on our campuses,” he said.
Rex noted the introduction and widespread adoption of generative AI — which can create text, images, videos and other data — isn’t following the traditional “trickle down” route of previous new technologies.
“Prior to generative AI, all tech has been top-down driven,” he said. “It begins in a very specialized, very expensive way, and maybe after 15 or 20 years, it trickles down to common usage.”
By contrast, he says generative AI is the first technology that’s “been unleashed” among everyday users first. He says that can provide opportunities for faster pace of adoption, though panelists also noted they’re taking into consideration ethical concerns and biases in AI due to the datasets on which it’s trained.
This quick adoption is already underway, pushing higher education and industry leaders to constantly keep up with how the technology is being used. Brian Thompson, chief innovation and partnership officer at UW-Milwaukee, yesterday argued both a top-down and bottom-up approach are needed to use AI to its fullest potential.
“The adoption curve on AI, generative AI, is orders of magnitude faster than even the fastest recent technology,” he said.
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