Generative AI made search, discovery and content creation easier

Our students are encouraged and guided to develop small apps using ChatGPT LMM technology, says Dr Abhijit Dasgupta, Director – Bachelor of Data Science, SP Jain School of Global Management

Have you now settled back into the pre-Covid paradigm or is it now fully hybrid?

Covid-19 lockdown and the ensuing situation changed the whole paradigm of higher education delivery for our school. Since we were quite advanced in terms of our education technology deployment, specifically I would like to point out to our award-winning state-of the-art ELO (engaged learning online) platform, Blackboard LMS etc., the transition was quite rapid. Even post-Covid, we continue to use ELO and other technologies to deliver educational content for our executive MBA (online) and a few other courses.

Interestingly, even during last two placement seasons, we achieved remarkable results in student’s outcomes, with positions offered in India, Vietnam, Australia etc. A few of our Bachelor of Data Science graduates found their way to top universities in US, UK, Canada, and they are doing phenomenally well. Students have found positions in USA as well.

Now since the lockdown has been lifted globally, we are back to the campus, and we see the happy faces of students. For now, except for the online MBA, all other programs are onsite, face to face, with some skill-workshops are being delivered online/hybrid (where a face2face lecture is broadcasted over a Video conference call).

What are the latest tech tools that you have implemented?

In our STEM programs, viz., Bachelor of Data Science and Master of Artificial Intelligence in Business, we keep on updating the syllabus/content, specifically keeping aligned with the industry requirements. We also teach content those might not have (as yet) been mainstreamed in the industry but going to be in next 2-5 years. Some of these are like MLOPs, ML System Design, Serverless Cloud, Microservices Engineering, Generative AI (a fine implementation of this technology is ChatGPT which went mainstream this year).

Will you be changing the syllabus to reflect the post-Covid world?

Our syllabus is updated nearly every year in terms of course but we typically use the flexibility offered within the broad range of subject outline to use latest tools and technologies. For instance, in our Data Mining course, we teach Artificial Neural Nets, but have updated it to teach Deep Learning concepts. In programming course, we teach Functional Programming using Scala. In Machine Learning course we are teaching Numerical Optimization covering Generative AI and so on.

What is your policy on ChatGPT?

We have been teaching Reinforcement Learning since last 5 years in this school, and the current state of research is in Generative AI, Computer Vision is also covered in the syllabus, course content.

We do not have a policy as such related to ChatGPT, except that any assignment, examination content, papers which has a potential to be written via ChatGPT are out of bounds. We use several filtering methods, and one of those is a simple plagiarism checker like Turnitin.

We teach DALL-E, LMM (Large Language Model) which are all pertaining to Generative AI, in our course. ChatGPT is an implementation of Generative AI which has made search, discovery and content creation quite easy.

Our students are encouraged and guided to develop small apps using ChatGPT LMM technology, and a few are already in the later stages of packaging for submission to Android and Apple platforms.

What more support do you want from the industry and government?

Industry in India should be forthcoming to collaborate with educational institutions like SP Jain and provide opportunity to experiment and research for new age technologies. In developed countries, industry provide funds to universities for research and much of those funds are invested keeping in mind that most often research may not lead to discovery of a new technology but extends the boundaries of enquiry and knowledge. This is where industry should come forth. Government also has an important role to play in terms of setting policy directives for high-technology getting mainstreamed in regular academic programs.

Dr Abhijit Dasgupta

Director – Bachelor of Data Science, SP Jain School of Global Management

aanchalg@cybermedia.co.in