WINONA, Minn. (KTTC) – A Winona State University alum has created a fund to support a student pilot project as AI becomes more prominent in professional spaces.
Justin Beatty, who graduated from WSU’s College of Business in 2010, has stayed involved in the community through student mentorship. He currently works for tech company Nvidia.
He wanted to give back to his school to ensure the next generation is not getting left behind as AI continues to grow rapidly.
“Coming from a background where I grew up in a town of 500 people, Winona State opened my eyes to a world that I didn’t know existed,” Beatty said. “I think artificial intelligence is very much that same way, where it’s allowing you to go another level deeper.”
A mentor of Beatty’s, Pat Paulson, a professor of business at the school, has been exploring ways to integrate AI in WSU classrooms. The two partnered to create the pilot program that provided $250 microgrants to eight student groups to pursue open-ended research projects that expand their understanding of AI while solving a community or campus concern.
WSU students Alama Traore and Sandumini Kaldera are both participants in the pilot program. With Paulson’s guidance, the two built an AI chatbot that allows students to ask questions or find information about campus life.
“We personally saw that there was a huge gap between how students access administrative information,” said Kaldera.
According to the students, the chatbot is powered by retrieval augmented generation, which means it only gets information from verified sources in order to generate truthful answers, preventing any from being made up.
Paulson said teaching AI to his students supports them and helps them understand how to use it in an ethical way.
“Businesses are using this technology, so we prepare our students for the future. We’re not doing our job if we’re not making sure that the companies that come in here and hire our students are prepared,” Paulson said.
Traore and Kaldera say the project has changed how both students see AI’s potential.
“I learned so much more than I expected,” said Traore. “Like through prompt engineering our chatbot and you know, developing our widget.”
“If not for this project, we would have never discovered how AI can be used beyond classrooms,” Kaldera said.
The two students are being recognized for their hard work on Thursday as they showcase their project at WSU’s Research and Creative Achievement Day event.
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