Guest Editor Letter

December 2022

This Holiday Season, May the AI be with you!

By: Badri Roysam, University of Houston

Dear ECEDHA Members, Industry Partners, and Colleagues,

As we enter the holiday season, may I please add “May the AI be with you!” to our customary holiday wishes to you and your family? Read on and you will see why this may be appropriate after all.

A few weeks ago, the new AI tool called “ChatGPT” was released by OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft. It is a freely available generative AI tool. It is an impressive polymath that can carry on surprisingly in-depth human-like conversations on a wide range of subjects including engineering and mathematics, computer science, history, biology, and economics, calculate signal transforms given a plain English sentence question, write code in a variety of programming languages, debug computer programs, summarize books, and formulate differential equations. It added nearly a million users in its first week of existence.

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always teased and fascinated us since the seventies. It has stunned us on many occasions as AI-based systems beat the reigning human champions of difficult games like Chess and Go. The field of general-purpose AI has remained the holy grail of the field and has made progress within its own cloistered community. The release of tools like ChatGPT to the general public suddently brings general-purpose AI into our offices and classrooms. We have to deal with it.

Many questions come to mind. The first round of questions is of an apprehensive nature:

Is this technology a threat to academia?
Can it inflict harm on our educational mission?
What kinds of disruptions will it cause?
Will it make many career options, e.g., software developer, engineer, educator, or graphic artist, obsolete?
Will students misuse it to write authentic-looking but AI-generated reports, take-home/online exams, theses, and such, making our task of educating students harder?

Once our emotions cool down a bit, more hopeful questions come to mind:

Can it be an enabling tool in the hands of our students and faculty?
Can it actually help enhance ECE education?
Can it help realize the National Academies' goal of creating systems for personalized education?
I am sure you have a long list of additional questions.

In this issue of Source, we are delighted to launch a discussion of AI and its emerging impact on ECE education. As always, we welcome your feedback and comments. Importantly, we welcome short articles from ECE department heads describing your ideas on how to take advantage of all these newfangled tools at our disposal.

Wishing you a wonderful Winter Holiday,