AICC Bridging the AI Skills Gap.
On 31st March Awakenhub attended an event hosted by AICC at the Ebrington Hotel in Derry titled Bridging the AI Skills Gap. This event was a great opportunity for the AICC to showcase the importance of AI from different sectors such as industry and within education and to showcase their virtual Learning Platform ‘The Learning Lab’. It also gave companies a chance to meet and network with other people in similar areas of interest and business.
Student Journey panel
The first panel was hosted by Professor Michaela Black, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at AICC and it gave an insight into student journey with AI. The panel included Frank Given, Close Focus and Postgraduate in ethical and Responsible AI, Mary Murphy, PhD researcher at Ulster University and MSc in Computer Science and Deborah Kerr, Education Authority and Postgraduate in ethical and Responsible AI.
The panel including Deborah Kerr spoke about the AI toolkit and how it can help in the public sector by helping people get ahead in terms of paperwork and planning which is an important task within the education sector of work.
One of the key messages and advice from the panel was to start small and look at online courses that don’t take up a lot of time allowing you to see how much work within AI you need to do to help your business.
Industry panel
In the second panel was led by Kathryn Harkin and she spoke to a panel of experts on AI in the industry. The speakers of the Panel were Cormac McAteer, Digital Transformation Officer at Seagate, Conor McCormick, Head of Technical Architecture at Alchemy and David Croxier Director of AICC.
They all shared their experiences working in industry and how AI had affected them. Cormac McAteer gave an overview into the importance of your prompt being meaningful when using AI for your work. He told the audience how a one-line prompt may not work when getting all the details you need and how he has seen one-page prompts give a better outcome overall.
Conor McCormick gave his insight into AI and how it can be used to help you when you are working with Clients and that manually putting the information into a database and then using AI to amend it is the best option.
David Croxier spoke on the use of AI and how important it is to be careful when implementing it in case it doesn’t go as planned stating that companies often get tripped up if they aren’t careful.
Launch of Learning Lab
Geraldine Doherty, Professional training and academic Co-ordinator at AICC introduced AICC’s virtual Learning Platform. The Learning Lab is a digital platform with several courses for you to register for, including Fundamentals of AI, Prompt to Prototype and Data Readiness for AI. Along with additional courses to help you enhance your AI skills.
AI Adoption vs AI capability
The final session of the event was interactive and engaging for the audience by allowing everyone at the event to share their thoughts on AI.
Some of the key takeaways from the interactive panel were to make sure that the data and information you are using is good and up to date before using AI to implement it because without making sure that is it good enough it is flawed before you even begin.
Another great point about AI mentioned was its ability to help you carry out tasks quickly that are normally required to do manually. Such as whiteboard meetings and agendas
An important point that was made at the event about the use of AI is to make sure you know where the data you are providing is being used as there is dangers with AI regarding breach of confidentiality which can damage a company’s reputation.
