If you were designing a new sequence related to artificial intelligence (AI) to have ready in time for the fall semester and your boss suggested that attending summer school in Paris might be helpful to that effort, that would be a good thing, right?

That’s how it happened that Drs. Will Lewis and James Wolf, both faculty members in the School of Information Technology (IT), found themselves in France at “HI! PARIS,” hosted by The Institut Polytechnique de Paris in late July, just ahead of the Olympics.

Their boss, Dr. Traci Carte, director of the School of Information Technology at Illinois State University, thought it was a good fit. Laurie Helms and Dmitry Zhdanov, also from IT, made the trip as well.

“I think Traci was familiar with the people who were putting on the school,” Wolf said. “We had just had the sequence approved and turns out that this school touched on a lot of the topics we were planning to touch on in the sequence. So, Traci said, ‘Hey, this looks like something you all might be interested in.’

“One of the reasons Traci was willing to pay for this trip was I think she could see that it would directly relate to what we were teaching and to Will’s research.”

For Carte, it was more specific.

“The reason to send these faculty to Paris was to help make sure their expertise in AI was appropriately transferred into effective teaching around AI,” she said.

The HI! PARIS sessions are prestigious and described on the school’s website as “becoming a destination of choice for the most talented researchers and students from all over the world, all addressing questions related to data science, artificial intelligence, their role in science, technology, business, and society.”

The idea to create the sequence for IT students at Illinois State had been in the works for a couple of years, Wolf said, adding that it started to take shape at last year’s faculty retreat.

“This sequence is basically a series of four courses that are related to artificial intelligence,” Wolf said. “I teach the first one, which is Introduction to Applied Artificial Intelligence. We have a couple more that are related to more machine learning. And then there’s a capstone class.”

Lewis said it was important to note that this was a school and not a conference. While they hadn’t met any of the instructors before, several were known to them by reputation. The courses they attended were intense, lasting most of a full day every day.

“Attendees took some courses—and quite a few were available—that had hands-on activities working with AI tools,” Lewis said.

Attendees and instructors came from around the world, but most were from Paris or the region. There were talks on AI in business and law and how AI law differs in the European Union compared to the U.S. Wolf said he heard several times how “Americans innovate, Europeans regulate.” He liked getting a different perspective from the American view that regulations restrict progress and clip the wings of the AI industry.

“There wasn’t a huge group from America, but we represented,” Wolf said. “It was a pretty eclectic group of people.”

Lewis said he enjoyed a course he took about integrating AI and machine learning into economics and management research.

“I liked that one because it talked about some of the practical approaches to the technology, and it gave me some ideas for an ARCS (Advancing Research and Creative Scholarship) project that I’m working on about residential inequality,” Lewis said. “One of the things that we plan to do with that project is develop an econometric model that determines what relationship public road maintenance has with neighborhood wealth, home values, and some of these other types of metrics. So, it was useful to get some perspectives on how to integrate artificial intelligence and economic models for projects.”

Wolf liked some of the keynote speakers whom he described as thought leaders who brought different perspectives on AI.

“One speaker was a woman from Oxford who talked about using AI to improve government services,” Wolf said. “That’s a very different perspective than we’re thinking here, where we’re thinking about AI taking over jobs, for example. She was talking about how to use AI to make sure that government works better, and again, a very different and unique perspective.

“She talked about the use of AI to improve interactions with the government, to make sure people who have access to programs actually know that they have that access, and to deliver services better.”

Both Lewis and Wolf have concerns about students misusing AI to do assignments. One speaker talked about emphasizing to students that AI does produce a lot of mistakes.

“We tend to think of AI as magic, and it’s not,” Wolf said.

Lewis said he’s seen work from his students that doesn’t always look right.

“Sometimes I’ll look at the answers and I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s accurate, but it’s not put into the terms that we discussed in class.’ In other words, there’s a good possibility they used some generative AI to write their response,” Lewis said.

That makes him concerned for his students’ understanding of the material.

“If they’re leaning on these tools instead of going through the cognitive process, then there’s an opportunity lost for them to learn the material even better,” he said. “I think ISU is in general trying to figure out how to deal with that.”

While in Paris, the group did make time to eat good food and see some of the city, including the work being done on Olympic venues as the start of the Olympic Games was only two weeks away. Lewis said it was cool to come home and watch on television and recognize places they had just seen in person, most notably the equestrian venues and the Olympic Rings on the Eiffel Tower.

Ultimately, Lewis said attending summer school in Paris was worth the time and effort.

“There’s a lot of material relating to artificial intelligence, and being able to go to the school and see how different educators are framing the learning in this area, I think was very useful,” he said.