C-W1 Artificial Intelligence in the News - Fall 2025
8 Week Class | Available (Membership Required)
The field of AI is in the news constantly and is changing very rapidly. You will see a wide variety of things called AI these days since it is an attention grabber and good marketing material. Most of the applications that you will run into use a combination of a form of Neural Network, and Expert Systems for computer assistance. We will discuss both types of constructions as we look into the current state of Computer Assistants, Copilots, Chatbots, etc.
We will spend a good portion of each of the 8 classes discussing what the latest developments in the news are and what they might mean to you and society in general. Since the impact is so widespread some of the developments will be technical, some will be financial/business, and some will be societal. If the new developments involve new or unfamiliar technologies or terminology, we will take some time to talk about the background needed to understand the news in those cases.
We will spend some time in each of the sessions looking at some specific offerings and what you might expect to be able to do with them if you are interested. (Many of the basic functions are still available for free and those will be the ones we will use for most discussions so that you can try them at home.)
Don Grice
Dr. Grice has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and worked at IBM in system design for close to 50 years, including a big emphasis on Man-Machine Interaction and large scale parallel supercomputing. His thesis was in the area of Voice Recognition and Communication similar to what we all take for granted today with systems like Siri and Alexa. He also worked with IBM’s Research Division on programs like Deep-Blue the Chess playing machine, and Watson the Jeopardy machine.