CISE IT | Edgar Huertas: Start the recording
CISE IT | Edgar Huertas: whenever you're ready.
Jeffrey Forbes: So we'll get started in just a minute.
Jeffrey Forbes: thank you all for coming.
Jeffrey Forbes: We're
Jeffrey Forbes: going to start the webinar
Jeffrey Forbes: and
Jeffrey Forbes: discuss
Jeffrey Forbes: educate AI
Jeffrey Forbes: computing and undergraduate education and the near classroom.
Jeffrey Forbes: and how they all connect to each other.
Jeffrey Forbes: Alright. So let's get started
Jeffrey Forbes: my name is Jeff Forbes. I'm a program officer in the director for computer information, science engineering and I am going to start us off today. So we're going to talk about the educate AI initiative and how that connects to the improving undergraduate stem education computing in a new graduate education program
Jeffrey Forbes: and the resources available for AI education from the national AI research resource. At the educate AI initiative is a joint initiative between the
Jeffrey Forbes: size director and the stem education or Edu director.
Jeffrey Forbes: I am joined here by Mike.
Jeffrey Forbes: colleague Alison Kennedy, who's also in education and workforce in size. And Katie Antipas, who is the office director of the office of Advanced cyber infrastructure.
Jeffrey Forbes: So I wanna start off today by talking about educate AI educate AI with new initiative announced towards the end of last year by Nsf. And the idea of educate AI is to enable educators to make state of the art inclusive
Jeffrey Forbes: artificial intelligence. Educational experience is available nationwide, and doing that for people at all levels. K, 12, community college for your college and graduate students as well as adults
Jeffrey Forbes: interested in formal training. And AI.
Jeffrey Forbes: Right now, all we have is the 1st phase of this which we have a dear colleague letter that invites a submissions and proposals to advance inclusive AI education. And today we're going to talk about that for 2 year and 4 year college students through the computing and undergraduate education program. But first, st I want to talk about educate AI.
Jeffrey Forbes: So educate AI seeks to support professional learning opportunities and communities by professionals were saying, how do we help educators or faculty in order to be able to incorporate AI education and has a particular focus on inclusive AI educational resources? Those that are going to be responsive and engage a broad cross section of students.
Jeffrey Forbes: And those educational resources can be a lot of different things, curricular tools, data, sources, assessments, and so on.
Jeffrey Forbes: And then also, we're also trying to support the educational infrastructure need to support AI education across institutions. So what we're particularly interested in is, how can we?
Jeffrey Forbes: how can we help AI education and support education, not just at individual institutions, but across institutions? And what the infrastructure is that we are need in order to do that.
Jeffrey Forbes: And we expect that we'll be able to build upon and contribute to research on Brian participation to better understand and inform efforts to support students from groups historically under represented in computing, and also contribute to the research and development needed to make save the art inclusive AI education available to all students, particularly in these 2 year colleges and 4 year colleges and universities.
Jeffrey Forbes: So
Jeffrey Forbes: in Educate I. AI. The goal is to incorporate AI material into computing courses. Now, you do we say, computing inside, we mean size, right? So science that can be computer science, computer engineering information, science, and things that are, you know, related to those computing courses that enable students to progress in AI education pathways
Jeffrey Forbes: and importantly, are responsive to the quickly changing need of the AI workforce. So that's part of what, while we say they are. And again, it's crucial that they aim to broaden participation in the AI workforce so brought in the participation of students from groups that are traditionally underrepresented under served by traditional courses.
Jeffrey Forbes: And we expected these proposals may incorporate the perspective of stakeholders such as particular. The AI subject matter experts in the size, community industry, professionals and educators, informal and informal settings. Who can inform the kind of work that you would do to create this inclusive AI education.
Jeffrey Forbes: And where appropriate, you might want to address data, science skills and practices relevant AI careers. And you're encouraged. Projects are encouraged as appropriate to connect to existing AI Research Institutes and other Nsf funded AI research projects in trying to expand AI education.
Jeffrey Forbes: So I want to talk about the computing and undergraduate education program. So the goals of this program
Jeffrey Forbes: broadly are to re envision how to teach, computing effectively in a scalable manner, focusing on those undergraduates from groups under served by traditional computing courses and careers.
Jeffrey Forbes: So there are 3 tracks to queue. And I'm gonna describe them relatively quickly. Note that we have a previous webinar which goes into more detail. That's linked to the program page on the 3 tracks, and also the solicitation will provide more details as well.
Jeffrey Forbes: The transformation track seeks to address key challenges in undergraduate education. Sometimes that's interdisciplinary education. How do you make courses more modern by integrating topics from emerging topics, such as artificial intelligence, holistic degree support and inclusive online teaching.
Jeffrey Forbes: The pathways track recognizes the key role of 2 year colleges in course, in degree and career pathways. So I,
Jeffrey Forbes: it encourages proposals that are trying to make those pathways more effective. Looking at both the entry points and transitions that are involved in pathways to 2 year colleges. And then there's the mobilized track about developing a national vision through competing the size community.
Jeffrey Forbes: So to talk about each of those tracks and brief and some of the key things. So the Q transformation is trying to address these key challenges in undergraduate education.
Jeffrey Forbes: A key part of a queue proposal is, it has to make a substantial regional or national impact on some aspect of competing pathways. It doesn't have to deal with all aspects of competing pathways, but should make some substantial, regional and national impact. So what that says is beyond, you know, a single institution and thinking about what this can do to be more transformative.
Jeffrey Forbes: And
Jeffrey Forbes: we want innovative ideas in computing education, so ones that are new approaches and actions that produce some kind of fundamental structural change, or go outside of or beyond existing norms and principles.
Jeffrey Forbes: If your goal is to adapt a well known idea into a new context that might be appropriate. For for example, we have the I use Edu program where you could focus on doesn't have to be the regional national impact. And you can do more in terms of focusing on something that
Jeffrey Forbes: mule
Jeffrey Forbes: might exist already, but doesn't exist in this particular context.
Jeffrey Forbes: The queue pathways as I said earlier, are supporting exploring, effective pathways, computing degrees and careers. Importantly, they have to involve a 2 year college as part of the partnership. The goal is is explicitly about how you're supporting pathways involving 2 year colleges. So a 2 year college has to be part of it
Jeffrey Forbes: partnership, and you know it is encouraged, but not required to have synergistic partnerships of industry as appropriate. Given the important role of industry with a lot of 2 year colleges
Jeffrey Forbes: the queue mobilize is developing a shared national vision around innovation and inclusion in undergraduate computing education.
Jeffrey Forbes: National is the key thing here. This needs to involve a very broad cross section of academic institutions, academic organizations. This needs to be something that's happening at a national level. In order to be a queue mobile as something that's focused on something smaller would not be appropriate for this, and we only make one queue mobilize award. So it's important to think about what your options are there.
Jeffrey Forbes: This can think about currently supporting key areas, how we can do transformation across institutions and how you can develop a common, scalable, educational infrastructure.
Jeffrey Forbes: Who can apply for queue. So queue institutions of higher education, nonprofit non academic organizations for profit organizations and state and local governments can apply
Jeffrey Forbes: importantly, transformation and passive proposals have to have an impact
Jeffrey Forbes: across multiple institutions.
Jeffrey Forbes: and in particular, they have to have a multi institutional partnership with a lead institute of higher education. At least 2 other institutes of higher education. So it's not merely enough to have one institution do the work, and then just
Jeffrey Forbes: and just pass it on to a couple of the students. But there has to have an impact across those multiple institutions. And when we say, you know, we expect 3 to be involved, we can. They can be more in terms of a transformation or or pathways proposal and bring this up because,
Jeffrey Forbes: in the previous competition, we fortunately had to return an
Jeffrey Forbes: substantial number of proposals without review, because they did not have not meet this requirement for the multi institution of partnership. So make sure that your project for transmission of pathways does do that.
Jeffrey Forbes: Okay, so now I'm going to pass it along to Katie to talk about their classroom.
Katie Antypas: Okay, thanks, Jeff.
Katie Antypas: So you may be wondering what you know. What does the ner have to to do with this? So I'm I wanna start with a couple of slides on backgrounds for the national AI research resource.
Katie Antypas: And tell you how that connects in with educate. AI,
Katie Antypas: okay, so the vision for the near
Katie Antypas: is a broadly accessible and a widely accessible national infrastructure that connects researcher researchers and educators to the necessary computing data software models, training and user support.
Katie Antypas: And the goal within there is really to democratize and broaden access to these resources that
Katie Antypas: hard to get access to to right now you can click again and check
Katie Antypas: and and some of the key goals that were laid out for the near are just for innovation, for the country increase the overall diversity of talent in AI
Katie Antypas: improve capacity for AI R&D, and to advance what's called trustworthy AI or responsible AI.
Katie Antypas: So next slide, I'm sometimes asked why why we need this concept of in there? And
Katie Antypas: well, there's many reasons. One is, while we do have large computing and data assets in our country. Many of these
Katie Antypas: critical resources are really concentrated. At our largest technology companies in in the country. Some really well resourced institutes or university. And we really wanna make sure that researchers that are investigating or using AI to investigate key societable challenges that they have access
Katie Antypas: as well
Katie Antypas: as our students. Right? Our students need to get hands-on access to models and and software.
Katie Antypas: And it's increasingly common that we hear from instructors or professors that just say, you know, I don't even have the resources to run an introductory class and and give the type of projects or assignments that we really need to prepare the next generation.
Katie Antypas: And so what the phase we are in right now in the near is, and we're in a pilot phase, and there was an executive order that directed Nsf to launch a pilot for the near.
Katie Antypas: That's okay. There you go. The next one division. The potential users of this veneer.
Katie Antypas: Absolutely AI researchers.
Katie Antypas: and domain scientists that are applying AI. Those is part of the chemist biologists physicists. But that 3rd category is why I'm here today. Because well, who is envisioned to be users of the near? Are students and educators as well.
Katie Antypas: So go to the next slide here. So in terms of the architecture for the near pilot, we are envisioning rate a set of researchers, us, based researchers and educators. They access resources through a near
Katie Antypas: portal near Portal near Pilot Org. I'll show you that a little later, and they access
Katie Antypas: distributed set of resources, computing cloud computing data sets and also educational platforms. So the key thing to remember here
Katie Antypas: I said it a lot. But it's confusing is that
Katie Antypas: the near is an infrastructure. It's an infrastructure where you request, and you could request access to computing or or data resources.
Katie Antypas: It's not providing funding for researchers or educators. Time. And that's why we're here and partnering with educate AI, because we know for many communities just providing, you know, a Jupiter like notebook is not gonna be enough. But we really wanna couple that with the curriculum development or
Katie Antypas: a research proposal like Jeff has described.
Katie Antypas: Okay, so go to the next slide here. So Jeff had asked, can we do this?
Katie Antypas: you know, Webinar, last week? I said, no, we absolutely have to do it this week, because we on Monday we announced
Katie Antypas: some new opportunities with the near pilot. And so you can go to near pilot.org.
Katie Antypas: And there are resources for for educators. They're they're primarily resources are like Jupiter notebooks that are all in one hardware and software interactive notebooks that are really popular in in courses now.
Katie Antypas: And
Katie Antypas: so, 1st of all, you can apply for these resources, even if you are not applying to educate AI. I will say that, and I will use the 110 people on this call to share that. But but we know just providing
Katie Antypas: access for some communities that's that's not enough. And that's why it's really important that we have this partnership with with educate AI, so that when you submit your proposal, you can also be requesting resources from the near pilot as well.
Katie Antypas: Let's go to the next slide.
Katie Antypas: There are are right now, there's 2 types of educator resources available. One is a notebook offering from a private sector company called Vocarion.
Katie Antypas: and this offering it integrates in with
Katie Antypas: I think learning management systems at at universities grading systems, for example.
Katie Antypas: and it's backed by some CPU resources which is really adequate for the majority of I think courses
Katie Antypas: they're not yet integrated with Gpus that we're we're kind of looking at options there. The second option is
Katie Antypas: a resource from the National Research Platform.
Katie Antypas: We call it Nrp, and these are more
Katie Antypas: just a standard Jupiter notebook. And they do have some integration with Gpus
Katie Antypas: applying for these resources is actually really straightforward. We're trying to make it a low barrier to entry. So
Katie Antypas: But you have to describe what your your course or tre or training is, and with a draft syllabus, the number of students that you would need to serve, and some kind of estimate of computing and storage needs.
Katie Antypas: And of course, one of the goals, for the near pilot is really to reach new communities communities who haven't participated in the AI ecosystem before. And so
Katie Antypas: you know, those those types of projects will really be a priority for the new pilot, and are really well aligned with, educate AI.
Katie Antypas: So the last slide here I want to just make sure that
Katie Antypas: there's really 2 ways to think about how near classroom is can be coupled with educate. AI. It's an opportunity for educators who have a great idea, but also need some of these computing or data resources.
Katie Antypas: To to couple those. It's also an opportunity for pis that
Katie Antypas: that may have infrastructure, but want to provide it to the education community in in a novel way.
Katie Antypas: What it is not is an opportunity to get more computing or gpus for your own
Katie Antypas: campus cluster. Right? So I just want to be very, very clear about that.
Katie Antypas: And if we have time, maybe I will show
Katie Antypas: just show off the website. And so I really want to make this real for.
Katie Antypas: or people. If you unshare Jeff all I will go ahead and share my
Katie Antypas: my screen.
Katie Antypas: So yeah, this just opened up on Monday. And so this is the the near pilot.
Katie Antypas: resources. You can go to current opportunities.
Katie Antypas: And it's a classroom educator call.
Katie Antypas: And so then you can see a description of
Katie Antypas: this. These resources, this one's from San Diego super computing center. It's called the Prototype National Research Platform for classroom.
Katie Antypas: And this is a vocarium
Katie Antypas: a cloud platform as well.
Katie Antypas: And
Katie Antypas: then it kind of shows you
Katie Antypas: the eligibility? Basically.
Katie Antypas: you know very well aligned with, educate a AI here courses. A curriculum for data. Science. AI related
Katie Antypas: course work. And then what you need to provide, which again, is like a course description, an estimate of the computing resources that you need, and then a few other odds, odds and ends, so that the team evaluating this to make sure there aren't like
Katie Antypas: They have enough resources spread over the duration of a semester or a year.
Katie Antypas: and then some more.
Katie Antypas: It's more just documentation formatting, and then you can like start your submission here, and if you have questions, then there's a help desk down here as as well.
Katie Antypas: So again, these are requests for like computing or educational platform resources. And this is not
Katie Antypas: like an Nsf. Proposal, but a request for resources that's managed by one of our awardees.
Jeffrey Forbes: Okay, thanks, Katie. So I want to talk a bit about
Jeffrey Forbes: the proposal preparation process and things you should include in your Q. Proposal.
Jeffrey Forbes: so note that Nsf has
Jeffrey Forbes: will. Effective may 20.th So in 11 days right before our deadline, we'll put out a new proposal and award policies and procedures guide.
Jeffrey Forbes: So this you should, of course, consult. It answers most of your general questions about Nsf proposals, but there are a couple of important notes. So one big one is, if you have any graduate students that you
Jeffrey Forbes: plan to fund in this, you need to include a mentoring plan for those graduate students similar to the post doctoral mentoring plan. Now, you have to have a mentoring plan for postdoctoral researchers or graduate students. And there's also some changes to how biographical sketches
Jeffrey Forbes: our work.
Jeffrey Forbes: so your proposal is judged by the Nsf. Merit review criteria. This intellectual merit and broader impacts. Those are the 2 criteria. And there's the 3rd set of criteria, solicitation, specific criteria.
Jeffrey Forbes: That asks.
Jeffrey Forbes: does the proposal identify the characteristics, characteristics, and needs of the intended populations to be served. And we say populations, that's saying that, are you identifying some under represented or underserved population that you and why that population is the one that you're addressing and then given that you've identified some population or set of populations.
Jeffrey Forbes: Does the proposal include specified plans or strategies for addressing and accommodating the particular needs of participants of the intended populations. Okay. So, remembering that broadening participation is a key aspect of these proposals. So that is what we need to do.
Jeffrey Forbes: Okay, so key components of a queue proposal.
Jeffrey Forbes: So we expect that a queue proposal is gonna have a knowledge base right? So that work needs to be grounded in relevant literature and prior work. It is important that your project recognize and build upon prior work in whatever in what you're doing, so that can be prioritized. But I think it's very important to look beyond your institution. See what we are doing?
Jeffrey Forbes: For your evaluation plan. You know. How are you planning to evaluate? You're gonna use independent value. You're going to have Advisor Board. But what kind of you know? What kind of expertise are you getting from your evaluation, and what's description of expertise in relationship to the project goals. And how will you use results from those evaluations to inform what you're doing? Going for?
Jeffrey Forbes: You need relevant research questions that need to be aligned with your research plan project activities and expected outcomes. They should be answerable through the data that you generate in your activities. So the questions that you pose. We hope you'll be able to address over the course of your project.
Jeffrey Forbes: You need a dissemination plan. You should identify appropriate channels of dissemination. And you need to use creative conferencing, creative commons licensing for new materials.
Jeffrey Forbes: since what you're doing is you're trying to
Jeffrey Forbes: improve undergraduate education, to point to also think about how what you're proposing is sustainable. So consider the sustainability of activities after funding and any design or software and hardware how that is going to be sustainable for the project that you're proposing.
Jeffrey Forbes: Important thing is you need a collaboration plan. So a collaboration plan is going to describe all the institutions that are involved in your project. So for a transformation or pathways you need to decide
Jeffrey Forbes: who the lead institute of Higher Education institution of higher education is, you have to say who that is, and how the other
Jeffrey Forbes: institutions are also going to be involved.
Jeffrey Forbes: Talk about what your common goals and common metrics are going to be. It's not nearly enough for 3 for 3 projects to just work on things independently. What are the common goals you're going to have. How are you? Gonna make sure you have appropriate communication and convenings to make sure that the project stays on track any management administrative structures. And then.
Jeffrey Forbes: in addition to evaluating how well the project's going, you also want to perhaps assess and evaluate the sex. The success of the collaboration.
Jeffrey Forbes: And you should, have references to budget line items that support collaboration and coordination mechanisms.
Jeffrey Forbes: Okay, board things. So
Jeffrey Forbes: please refer to the Q. Solicitation for details. That is the authority, not what we say here. And the deadline is May 30.th So we know this is last minute. But we wanted to make sure you got information about educate AI in their classroom.
Jeffrey Forbes: and future deadlines are in the future.
Jeffrey Forbes: They hopefully watch it.
Jeffrey Forbes: right now we're in the proposal receipt window. Just so, you know. You know the proposal is going to come in, and then, if you want to know how long will take to make a decision. We aim to have a recommendation on your just on your proposal within 6 months of the deadline.
Jeffrey Forbes: and then award will happen usually within 30 days of us making our recommendation.
Jeffrey Forbes: Okay?
Jeffrey Forbes: So with that, I think we can go to questions, and what will be best is, submit your questions.