The Coalition of Artificial intelligence In Puerto Rico, the Committee on Public Policy, composed of educational institutions, agencies and other sectors of the country, met for the first time on Thursday and determined to focus its work on five committees on public policy, cybersecurity, health, education and human resources, in order to educate and propose solutions to the emerging challenges of these new technologies.
“This is for Puerto Rico, for our future, for our students“, summarized Ana Milena Lucumi OrosteguiVice President of Professional and Distance Programs at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), at the end of the meeting in the Rio Piedras Botanical Garden.
At the beginning of March, after the first International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Educationthe Coalition was created and opened the call for new members to form different working committees, which were finally defined on Thursday. At the congress, held at the UPR Theater, in the Río Piedras Campus, the university signed a collaborative agreement with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to broaden the horizons of research on artificial intelligence in and outside the classroom.
“By calling on all these sectors, what we wanted was for people to get involved in observing, researching and educating themselves about the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, in light of the impact that this represents for society in all areas,” explained Lucumi Orostegui.
“Artificial intelligence is becoming a concern for the preservation of many people’s jobs; so how do we evolve from our different jobs? to optimize it with the help of artificial intelligence and not to think that a robot with artificial intelligence will replace us?“, he added.
In an interview with The new daythe virtual education specialist stated that “what can overthrow paradigms in the minds of human beings is education,” in relation to the resistance that may still exist in the country regarding new methods to speed up educational steps in different fields.
Regarding the educational committee, he explained that members could address concerns such as plagiarism and, at the same time, present alternatives for the training of teachers in methodology or tools that can assist them in identifying possible acts of academic dishonesty.
“The important thing now is to train teachers and professors in effective evaluation systems, because that is what, in some way, guarantees being able to see the student’s performance by making different triangulations of the way I collect the data, how I observe their participation, how I see them perform; Look at how the competition dominates rather than penalize, because the student will always find a way to plagiarize with technology“, Lucumi Orostegui explained.
In addition, the group will evaluate current public policy to determine whether further legislation related to these cross-cutting issues is needed and, in the future, present bills to educate the next government administration, which will begin in January 2025.
“We have the same concern, the same challenge. If we approach it as a national project, then Puerto Rico will benefit.” This begins as a coalition for Puerto Rico and we could be a model for the Caribbean”he stressed.
Representatives from the rectorates of the 11 units of the UPR system and other private institutions, such as the Interamerican University, EDP University, ICPR Junior College, Ponce Health Sciences, HETS Consortium and NUC University, among others, joined the working table.
“Society, in general, has one of the greatest contemporary challenges, but mainly for universities and their teaching, it is the phenomenon of an evolving technology that has gained popularity in recent years due to its ability to generate content from existing data, and it is artificial intelligence in its generative version. As a university, we must integrate all sectors and seek to work on this issue responsibly.“, pointed out the president of UPR, Luis A. Ferrao Delgado.
In addition, the New Progressive Party representative participates in the Coalition Jose Aponte Hernandez and officials from agencies such as the Office of Innovation and Technology Serviceshe Department of Economic Development and Trade and the Education deparment.