Literacy in Emerging AI Techniques

Name: Literacy in Emerging AI Techniques
Start: 2025-04-25T08:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-04-25T17:00:00-05:00

April 25 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm

Develop awareness of cutting-edge AI technologies that few professionals understand beyond the hype. This positions you at the forefront of innovation rather than following mainstream trends, helping you move beyond surface-level understanding of popular AI tools to grasp underlying technologies and evaluate new AI developments as they emerge.
The program connects state-of-the-art AI advances with practical applications relevant to your field. You’ll learn to identify which emerging techniques can solve specific problems in your domain, develop the ability to communicate AI capabilities and limitations to stakeholders, and create a personalized roadmap for integrating advanced AI into your professional context.
Upon completion, you’ll earn a digital credential from Iowa State University’s Translational AI Center that demonstrates your commitment to continuous learning in this rapidly evolving field.

Next-Generation Foundation Models: Explore Claude 3.7, GPT-5, Gemini 2.0, and other advanced multimodal models
AI Agents & Reasoning: Examine autonomous AI systems, chain-of-thought prompting, and reasoning frameworks
Multimodal Intelligence: Uncover the latest in image/text/audio/video models like Sora, Claude Sonnet, and DALL-E 3
Computer Vision Advances: Explore SAM 2, YOLO-NAS, and open-source vision models
Cutting-Edge Architectures: Master mixture-of-experts, RLHF, DPO, and state-space models
Scientific Machine Learning: Learn how AI is accelerating scientific discovery and simulation
Responsible AI Development: Understand current approaches to alignment, safety, and governance

AI Infrastructure: Explore efficient deployment, fine-tuning, and scaling of AI systems

Attendance & Participation (25%): Attend the 8-hour tutorial and participate in guided group discussions and breakout activities
Knowledge Assessment (40%): Complete pre-tutorial assessment to establish baseline knowledge. Achieve minimum 70% score on post-tutorial assessment covering key concepts, techniques, and applications
Case Study Analysis (Group activity) (35%)
- Analyze a provided real-world scenario involving AI application challenges
- Identify appropriate AI approaches for the scenario
- Evaluate potential benefits, limitations, and ethical considerations
- Present your analysis

Literacy in Emerging AI Techniques

Time	Session
8:30 – 9:00	☕ Coffee & Snacks + Meet & Greet
9:00 – 10:00	Intro to AI & Machine Learning History, evolution, and why AI is powerful today
10:00 – 11:00	Large Language Models & GenAI LLM 101, Prompting techniques; Under the hood: Transformers, Mixture-of-experts, RLHF, DPO, and State-Space Models.
11:00 – 12:15	Agentic AI & AI That Acts LLM-powered agents, planning, tool use
12:15 – 1:00	🍽️ Lunch Break
1:00 – 2:00	Vision AI Advances in computer vision: SAM 2, YOLO-NAS, Grounding DINO
2:00 – 3:00	Immersive AI NeRFs, avatars, generative 3D and VR tools
3:00 – 3:45	AI + X Applications in science, health, agriculture, education, and writing
3:45 – 4:30	Speculative & Frontier AI BCIs, AI emotions, synthetic consciousness, ethics
4:30 – 5:30	💬 Discussion + Surprise Demos + Q&A

About the Tutorial