AI Awareness Workshop [ASS_AIW]

OVERVIEW

The AssistKD AI Awareness Workshop offers a clear and practical introduction to artificial intelligence. Starting with a brief look at the history of AI, it progresses to explore key concepts like narrow AI, artificial general intelligence, and the Turing Test of machine intelligence.  The workshop is designed to be interactive and collaborative with group discussions and practical exercises to take a deeper dive into the wide range of applications of AI and the technologies that underpin them, considering the benefits, risks, and ethical issues surrounding the use of AI. The workshop concludes with insights into how AI is reshaping the workplace and tips for successful adoption.

OBJECTIVES

Upon completion of this workshop participants shall be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The meaning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the distinction between strong (general) and weak (narrow) AI
• The concept of the ‘singularity’, as it applies to AI, and the purpose of the Turing test as a measure of machine intelligence
• The range of current applications of AI, and the key benefits and potential risks associated with using AI
• The purpose of a range of popular AI technologies
• A range of ethical issues relating to the use of AI, in particular the use of AI for autonomous decision making
• The potential implications of AI for job roles and the future of work, in particular how humans and AI may complement each other

AUDIENCE

This workshop is for anyone who wants to gain a broad understanding of Artificial Intelligence and appreciate how it may be used successfully within organisations. In particular: business analysts; project managers; customer journey managers; product owners; service designers; project leaders; and business change managers.

CONTENT

Introduction to AI

• What is AI?
• A brief history of AI
• Different types of AI: strong (general) AI, weak (narrow) AI and superintelligent AI
• Artificial general intelligence and the singularity - science fiction or fact?
• Humanity and intelligence - the Turing test

Common applications of AI

• Generative AI and prompt engineering
• Text generation, paraphrasing text, summarising documents, recognising handwriting
• Synthetic media: image generation, video generation, speech synthesis (text-to-speech)
• Data augmentation 
• AI chatbots
• Virtual assistants
• Autonomous vehicles
• Text, object, face and speech recognition
• AI-powered robots
• Cybersecurity - threat and fraud detection
• Predictive analytics and decision support
• Digital twins and advanced diagnostics

Overview of AI technologies

• Top-down (symbolic) and bottom-up (sub-symbolic) approaches to AI
• Knowledge graphs
• Logic programming
• Artificial neural networks
• Machine learning and deep learning
• Natural language processing
• Computer vision
• Generative AI (large language models, generative pre-trained transformers, generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs)
• AI agents
• Evolutionary algortithms

AI - opportunity or threat?

• Benefits of using AI
• Risks associated with using AI
• Bias in algorithms
• Autonomous decision making
• Human in the loop
• Deep fakes

The ethics of AI

• Key ethical concerns regarding the use of AI
• Artificial empathy
• Legislation applying to the development and adoption of AI

AI and the future of work

• Reshaping the workplace with AI
• AI and humans working together (collaborative intelligence)
• Key challenges for AI adoption
• Tips for adopting AI technologies