UW-Madison prioritizes artificial intelligence in alumni address

Interim chancellor Eric Wilcots and founding dean of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI) Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau presented a measured view of artificial intelligence in higher education at a Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (WFAA) virtual panel on August 18.

Wilcots and Arpaci-Dusseau both said students should be AI competent when they graduate, but that UW-Madison needs to handle AI’s pervasiveness in college life: cracking down on take-home assessments while navigating emptier classrooms and a “silent spring” on Piazza, a popular classroom forum and social networking tool, as students increasingly turn to chatbots.

“Over the course of 120 credits that a student might spend at UW-Madison, there's going to be some fraction of that where they're doing a deep dive into AI,” Wilcots said. “There's [also] got to be a set of [courses] where it really is the blue book, the writing in class, the unaccompanied learning.”

Both Wilcots and Arpaci-Dusseau are long-time UW-Madison faculty: Wilcots, formerly the Dean of the College of Letters and Science before succeeding Jennifer Mnookin as Chancellor on May 17, has been an astronomy professor since 1995 and Arpaci-Dusseau joined the computer science department in 2000.