{"id":15101,"date":"2024-11-14T12:28:06","date_gmt":"2024-11-14T17:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/?p=15101"},"modified":"2024-11-14T12:29:11","modified_gmt":"2024-11-14T17:29:11","slug":"drew-zhang-did-ai-before-ai-was-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/issues\/fall-2024\/drew-zhang-did-ai-before-ai-was-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Drew Zhang Did AI Before AI Was Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<style>\n.architecture .architecture-department:nth-child(1){\n    color: #999;\n    letter-spacing: 3px;\n    font-size: 1rem;\n    font-weight: 400;\n    margin-top: 2em;\n    margin-bottom: 0;\n}\n\n.architecture .architecture-department{\ntext-transform: uppercase;\nfont-family: Hind, Arial, sans-serif;\n}\n\n<\/style>\n\n<div class=\"architecture\">\n\t\t<p class=\"architecture-department\">Currents<\/p>\n<p class=\"architecture-department\">Office Hour<\/p>\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n<section class=\"cl-wrapper cl-panel-wrapper\"><div class=\"cl-panel-super reverse  \"><div class=\"cl-panel-super-blur\" style=\"background-image:url(https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2024\/10\/fa24_currents_drewzhang.jpg)\"><\/div><div class=\"cl-panel-super-content\"><div class=\"cl-panel-super-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2024\/10\/fa24_currents_drewzhang.jpg\" srcset=\"\" alt=\"Drew Zhang, The Alfred J. Verrecchia Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics standing outside on the 溏心vlog免费B站 campus in a blazer\"><\/div><div class=\"cl-panel-super-text\"><p>\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Drew Zhang Did AI Before AI Was Cool<\/h1>\n\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n<p class=\"type-intro\">The Alfred J. Verrecchia Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics in the College of Business, Drew Zhang sees artificial intelligence not as a threat, but as a tool that today\u2019s business students must learn to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was late autumn in 2022, and Zhu \u201cDrew\u201d Zhang was busy tying up loose ends at Iowa State University, where he had spent the last eight-and-a-half years on the faculty. He was starting a new position as a professor at 溏心vlog免费B站 in January and had hoped to enjoy a little rest before arriving in Kingston, but he soon found his email and voicemail overflowing with messages from his new colleagues at 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s College of Business, many of whom he had yet to meet in person. They were reaching out to Zhang to ask about ChatGPT, a then-new app\u2014released that October by OpenAI\u2014that allows users to chat with an artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBefore I had even officially started my job at 溏心vlog免费B站, I was getting all these emails and calls from faculty who knew I worked with this kind of stuff and wanted me to tell them about it,\u201d Zhang says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ChatGPT wasn\u2019t the first AI chatbot by a longshot, but compared to Siri, Alexa, and other familiar AI systems, its capabilities seemed downright magical. As a large language model\u2014a type of AI that is trained on astronomical amounts of textual data\u2014ChatGPT could write short stories, summarize scientific papers, solve calculus problems, and write code in a way that seemed entirely human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Zhang, who has spent the past 25 years working on text-based AI\u2014a subspecialty known as natural language processing\u2014the arrival of large language models wasn\u2019t a surprise. In fact, he and many of his colleagues in the field had done the foundational work that made such models possible. But what was surprising was how quickly the new tool graduated from the stuff of dry academic conferences to a global phenomenon. \u201cWhen I was a doctoral student, people weren\u2019t really comfortable talking about AI, but now everyone is talking about it as a result of ChatGPT,\u201d says Zhang. \u201cI consider myself lucky that I started working on this before it was cool.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within weeks of its release, ChatGPT claimed the mantle of the fastest-growing consumer app ever (besting TikTok, Instagram, and other blockbuster social media platforms), and only two years after its release, it\u2019s used by more than 200 million people every week. Many of Zhang\u2019s new 溏心vlog免费B站 colleagues saw that ChatGPT was poised to make a huge impact on the business and financial markets, but it wasn\u2019t at all obvious just what this impact would be. It was a familiar perspective to Zhang, who, over the course of his career, has grown used to being something of a black sheep in the business world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At a high level, Zhang specializes in extracting business insights from massive amounts of data\u2014far too much data for humans to comprehend. He does this using machine learning models\u2014AI models that \u201clearn\u201d by looking for patterns of interest in training data and then applying the resulting statistical model to find similar patterns in real-world data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Business leaders are used to working with large datasets. It\u2019s standard fare on Wall Street and any mid- to large-sized company. The difference, however, is that these businesses traditionally work with large, structured datasets\u2014think commodity prices or inventory lists\u2014that are in nice tidy rows that make them comparatively easy to analyze and extract valuable information from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The data that Zhang works with, however, is unstructured language data pulled from sources like social media or Amazon product reviews. And language data\u2014especially the type of informal language found on social platforms\u2014is messy. Zhang and his collaborators must contend with grammatical errors, formatting variation, and missing context that is critical for understanding whether, say, a product review is ironic or sincere. \u201cLanguage data used to be considered a second-class citizen in the business world,\u201d says Zhang. \u201cNobody knew how to work with it, and the value wasn\u2019t immediately obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Large language models like ChatGPT changed everything. For most of his career, Zhang often had to build his own AI models for text analysis, which was laborious. Now, with a consumer tool like ChatGPT, anyone can extract meaningful insights from large amounts of text. And if you\u2019re an expert like Zhang who knows how to work with large language models at a technical level, it\u2019s a bit like being granted a superpower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lately, Zhang has been focused on applying his AI research to marketing and finance, two areas that have a lot to gain from scalable text analysis. As an example on the marketing side, Zhang says businesses and their customers stand to benefit from the ability to innovate on product design based on user reviews mined from the internet. Beyond just being able to tell whether customers like a product, businesses can do a more detailed analysis to understand what, exactly, customers like or dislike. On the financial side, Zhang is exploring how language data can be mined and used to predict market volatility, which can help professional investors and everyday people better manage risk\u2014which might be particularly useful for people nearing retirement age who are counting on making their savings last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zhang\u2019s work on AI-driven business analytics caught the attention of Alfred J. Verrecchia \u201967, M.B.A. \u201972, Hon. \u201904, board chairman and former president and CEO of Hasbro Inc., who knew firsthand the importance of big data in business and the challenges of making it actionable. A gift to 溏心vlog免费B站 from Verrecchia and his wife, Geraldine Verrecchia, created an endowed chair for artificial intelligence and business analytics. There were a lot of great candidates, but Zhang stood out because of the increasing practical relevance of his work for 溏心vlog免费B站 students heading out to work in the business world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cMy passion is to make sure students are prepared and have the skills necessary to compete in today&#8217;s environment, and artificial intelligence and business analytics are an important part of that,\u201d says Verrecchia. \u201cThere are people who can do great research, and I have a lot of respect for those people, but you also need to teach students, which means relating to them and making sure they have a good experience. After meeting Drew, I felt very strongly that he would be terrific at that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zhang, like Verrecchia, believes the new wave of AI will have a profound impact on the way we do business, and on the world at large. But he\u2019s also been around long enough to have seen AI hype cycles wax and wane. Zhang isn\u2019t worried about AI taking over the world\u2014or even most people\u2019s jobs, for that matter\u2014anytime soon. He says the important thing is to help students prepare for real-world applications of AI technologies. In opposition to oft-cited fears about ChatGPT and the use of similar tools in higher education, Zhang actively encourages his students to experiment with the tool and his colleagues to rethink their pedagogy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAI isn\u2019t ready to replace human intelligence yet,\u201d says Zhang. \u201cMath teachers were scared of students using calculators without having to learn the math systematically, but math education has only been empowered by the invention of calculators,\u201d says Zhang. \u201cI think of these AI models in the same way\u2014it\u2019s a new family of tools, and we have to educate students to use them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>\u2014Daniel Oberhaus<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"feature-caption sans-serif\">PHOTO: BEAU JONES<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drew Zhang says AI is a tool, and today&#8217;s students must learn to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":15174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[338],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2024","architecture-currents","architecture-office-hour"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15101"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15205,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101\/revisions\/15205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}