The concept of Generative AI simply did not exist in public consciousness until OpenAI released ChatGPT about three and a half years ago. Now, Florida Gulf Coast University’s Dendritic AI Institute is hosting its second monthlong summer academy that aims to have something for everyone who wants to learn about this rapidly emerging world.
Whether you’re an absolute newbie with no experience yet hoping to catch up, or if an educator or researcher, or industry professional or nonprofit leader, the Summer AI Academy is offering more than 30 sessions totaling more than 150 hours, with topics ranging from basic AI literacy and using image generation tools, to things like programming with AI and doing data analysis. They even have sessions aimed at certain industries like one called Hands-On AI Workshop for Construction Professionals. The Summer Academy kicks off on May 4. It's the second year they've offered the summer sessions.
FGCU’s Dendritic Human-Centered AI and Data Science Institute was founded in 2023 with a mission to work on the development of, and application of, Artificial Intelligence. They have a branch dedicated to researching and developing different types of applications, and a branch dedicated to AI education which includes the university’s AI Academy.
We talk with the Dendritic Institute's Founding Director to learn more. Click here to learn more about the Summer AI Academy, including pricing and availability. All sessions are free to FGCU students, faculty, and staff.
Guest:
Dr. Leandro de Castro, Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Data Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University, and founding director of FGCU’s Dendritic Institute.
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Mike Kiniry
This is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry. Thanks for joining us. If you're beginning to feel like generative AI is taking over the world, you're not alone. When it comes to our economy, it has become the dominant driver of recent stock market gains, with AI-related companies accounting for roughly 3/4 of S&P 500 returns since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Companies and entrepreneurs are turning to AI tools and agents to increase their productivity. Movie studios are integrating it into their workflows. Spotify and other online music platforms are being flooded by songs created by people using text prompts with generative AI chatbots. What exactly the long-term benefits will turn out to be is still an open question, as is whether we're in an economic bubble because of it all. But if you're personally interested in learning about generative AI, whether you're an absolute newbie with no experience yet hoping to catch up, or if you're an educator or researcher or an industry professional or non-profit leader, Florida Gulf Coast University has a month of programs that cover all of those bases beginning next week. FGCU's Dendritic AI and Machine Learning Institute was founded in 2023 with a mission to work on the development of and application of artificial intelligence. They have a branch dedicated to researching and developing different types of applications, and a branch dedicated to AI education, which includes the university's AI Academy. Starting Monday, May 4th, the Institute is presenting its second summer AI Academy, featuring more than 30 sessions, totaling more than 150 hours in all, with topics ranging from basic AI literacy and using image generation tools, to things like programming with AI and doing data analysis. They even have sessions aimed at certain industries, like one called Hands-On AI Workshop for Construction Professionals. To get a preview, I spoke recently with the Dendritic Institute's founding director. Let's hear that conversation now. Dr. Leandro DeCastro is a full professor of artificial intelligence and data sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University and founding director of FGCU's Dendritic Institute. Welcome back to the show, Dr. DeCastro.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Thank you. Thank you for having me back.
Mike Kiniry
So I went back and looked. You were in the studio almost exactly six months ago. And we went into the background of the institute and your background, and so we won't get too much into that today, but if listeners go to the web post for this show, there'll be a link to that. But do give listeners listening now a brief description or overview of what the institute is, you know, as if you met somebody out in the world and they asked you what it was.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, absolutely. Dendritic is the first AI and data science, the first and only AI and data science institute at FGCU. And its mission covers mainly the development and the application of artificial intelligence. This means that we work with AI research, the development, the improvement of AI solutions for different types of applications. At the same time, we have a very strong branch working with AI education. This includes the development of the FGCU AI Academy, which is almost ready for launch. This It's 3 core programs and a few others that we are working on. These also include the Summer Academy, which we are going to talk more extensively about today. And we, in our third branch, we do some outreach programs, mainly related with helping the community, small businesses, government institutions, NGOs, to solve problems that can be solved by AI.
Mike Kiniry
I was, I don't want to forget to ask this. You just mentioned that you're going to be launching an AI academy, which is not the same thing as the Summer Academy. Explain what you mean by that.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, well, the Summer Academy is 1 specific intensive program that is going to run throughout the whole month of May, starting a couple of weeks from now. in which we have webinars, workshops, and trainings, most of them in person and the webinars online. So this is a single training program aimed really at developing the skills related with artificial intelligence and data science in our community, internal and external community. So this is one single program. that happens every summer. This is the second time we are offering the Summer Academy here at FGCU. And the FGCU AI Academy, this is an online academy which is going to be available for everyone, internal and external, but this training, these sessions will be taken online. Right? So there are different things in their purposes and in their formats as well.
Mike Kiniry
Will any of the stuff that happens at the Summer Academy next month become part of that online academy? Seems like you could repurpose some of the learning.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Absolutely. Well, spot on. And actually, one of the things that we are doing with the Summer Academy is we are going to record some of the programs that we'll have during the Summer Academy next month of May. and we are going to transform them into programs for our AI academy.
Mike Kiniry
That makes perfect sense. So last summer was the first summer academy. How much bigger, how much more robust is the one this summer compared to last summer?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Sure, I would say we doubled the size. Last year we had 15 different sessions, the same types of sessions, webinars, workshops, and trainings. with a total of approximately 80 hours of program throughout the months of May and June. So it was longer, but it was much less concentrated. For example, last year, during the first two weeks of June, we didn't have any session at all. This year, we have sessions every single day during the month of May, starting May 4th. And this year, we have 31 different sessions offered by or facilitated by 21 different instructors, internal and community instructors, experts in their fields, with a total of more than 150 hours. So overall, I can say we are double the size in terms of offerings this year when compared with last year.
Mike Kiniry
I'm going to put you on the spot because I don't know if this will be easily answered or not, but are there any sessions happening this summer that did not happen last summer, not because you just didn't have the bandwidth, but because the topic didn't exist yet.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, that's a great question. The point for us, not really in terms of some novelties in the field, it's much more focused on how do we frame this content for the community. Because one thing that we learned from last year to now is that different community members have different needs. And we designed the academy this year such that we could cover enough topics and a variety of topics as well, to be able to bring content for, example, the more academic community in terms of teaching with AI, research with AI, and how to learn with AI, because this is a completely paradigm shift that we are going through. And at the same time, we have some sessions that are very much tailored to entrepreneurs, to business people. For example, how do you design or how do you plan a new business using AI? AI as a sort of co-founder, right? So one thing that we did this year is we organized better the content.
Mike Kiniry
Explain the difference between the trainings and the workshops.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
As I said, we have three different types of sessions. The webinars are online. They usually last between 1:00 and 1 1/2 hour.
Mike Kiniry
Are the webinars in conjunction with the other two or their own thing?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
It's their own thing. Okay, Right. There are three types of sessions that we have. And the other two sessions are the workshops and the trainings, as you asked. The difference is that the workshops, they last between 2:00 and 4:00 hours. and the trainings last between 8 and 10 hours. The trainings can be done in a single full day, or they can be spread throughout a whole week. For example, two hours a day for four or five days. One important thing to understand is that all of them, with the exception of the webinars that are more informative, the workshops and the trainings, are very hands-on sessions. So we always ask our students to bring their own laptops, so that they can play and they can really experience it, they can really live AI, right? So we are not focused only on the concept. We are focused on the hands-on use of these tools on your daily life.
Mike Kiniry
Just to make it clear, you just used the word students, but by that you did not mean just students. You meant the people who attend are the students. So break down like, if somebody's listening to this and they think, I don't know if this has got any anything for me, this is for, you made a list, it's like researchers, faculty, industry professionals, non-profit leaders, so kind of go through the, if somebody's listening, the scope of who might be interested or who might benefit.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, great point. I mean, I'm an instructor, I'm A faculty, so I'm used to call everybody that you're teaching to.
Mike Kiniry
I'm just asking on behalf of the listener.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, you're completely right. So, I mean, our attendees, right, those people that come to the academy. So, and as I said, I mean, the academy is very hands-on. It's created for the community. And if you look at the academy, you see that we have six different tracks. that go from AI literacy and foundations up to the use of specific AI tools. So the academy has a coverage that can go from the very basics, the very introductory concepts, up to the development of specific skills, for example, how to program with AI, how to do machine learning with AI, which is how to do AI with AI, right? That's one of the things that we are going to cover as well. So the coverage of our program is for the community in general, including the more literate people to those that are newcomers to the field.
Mike Kiniry
I went through and listed out all the programs, and I've got some bolded here, just to give listeners a sense of the scope. Effective pedagogical strategies for AI integration in higher education, programming with AI, machine learning with AI, as you mentioned, What is human-centered AI for Southwest Florida water?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Okay, so there are two key words there, I would say. The first one is human-centered AI, and the second one is Southwest Florida water. So the first one is about how to use AI, and the second one is about the application itself. When we talk about human-centered AI, what we mean is that AI is an assistant to us. We, humans, are the human intelligence side, and the artificial intelligence is the AI side of this partnership. So when we talk about human-centered AI, we mean that we are in control of the process. AI supports us in whatever we are doing. It can be to help us, for example, to plan something new in our homes, to plan a trip, or even to program a computer, but we have the control and we use AI to support us. We use AI as an assistant. This is very much important because there are many people that want to use AI to do the job for them. And this type of cognitive offloading is not exactly what we advocate for. We advocate for the use of AI as a support tool and not as a replacement tool. So this is the human-centered part. And the Southwest Florida Water is the application because the instructor who's bringing this content to us is an expert in what we call environmental data science. And one of his main applications is exactly on the use of artificial intelligence and data science to solve environmental-related, more specifically water quality and other types of problems related with water in Southwest Florida.
Mike Kiniry
Interesting. So somebody from the Water Management District or from one of the county's environmental departments or something like that could go to it. Or anybody.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yes, absolutely. If you're interested in environmental problems and how AI and data science can be used, To tackle these types of problems, this would be an interesting session to attend.
Mike Kiniry
Next one I bolded was Vibe Coding, which is, if people aren't familiar, it's a way that you can mostly create websites or apps, I think, but probably anything without knowing how to code, I guess, would be a way to put it.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, absolutely. So, we are going to have a workshop on that. And there is some relationship between, it's a different approach, but between this session and the training that we are going to have in terms of programming with AI. Programming with AI is really how to use AI to program for you.
Mike Kiniry
Deeper in the weeds.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, it's a bit deeper. But I would say they complement one another because it's always this idea of how to use AI to create something that usually requires coding. So that's the back end of it.
Mike Kiniry
Generative AI beyond text, putting image and music generators to the test.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah.
Mike Kiniry
That's something that people are becoming familiar with.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, absolutely. And that's one interesting thing because last year we had a session called AI Productivity Tools, which had a huge audience. We actually had two offerings of that single session. In that session, we included a number of techniques, including techniques on how to use AI to generate images, to manipulate images, and things like that. This year, we segmented our program a little bit more. So we have a program on AI literacy, which we didn't have last year. And this one focuses more on prompt engineering, context engineering. It talks about how to create personalized assistants, how to create AI workspaces. And we have this session, which is more dedicated to the use of AI in images and other types of creations.
Mike Kiniry
I spoke a few weeks ago on the show with a woman who was on campus to give a talk as part of the Provost Seminar Series. And her talk was about the pivot that's happening between prompt engineering, which is using a chatbot to tell it to do things, to agentic AI orchestration. Anything on agentic AI in the summer academy?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, that's a good point. Some people have been asking me that.
Mike Kiniry
I mean, it wasn't something we could have talked about six months ago. It's true.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
It's true. I mean, and it's really interesting because, for example, when I used to give general AI talks to the community 1 1/2 year ago, two years ago, when I asked people, okay, who here is using AI? I had sort of half a room raising the hands. But this is the kind of question that it makes no sense anymore to ask because everybody's going to raise their hand, right? So the question that we have to ask now is much more specific. For example, who here has your own agentic AI or your own agent helping you with specific tasks in a more automatic way? So yeah, so things change. But In this edition of our Summer Academy, unfortunately, we don't have any agentic AI session available.
Mike Kiniry
Have you delved into that territory yet? I've talked to a couple people, like another person I spoke to for the lecture series says that he has five different agents for his workflow that he has developed and he continues to strengthen that he uses in conjunction with each other to do work. Have you gone into that realm at all?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, I'm not. really building specific agents for some of the tasks that I have, but that is certainly something that is in my pipeline. I've been building a number of AI tools, but they are much simpler AI solutions.
Mike Kiniry
What are your thoughts on just that as a concept? People who if it all works out, people are going to be able to run little companies as if they've got four or five employees using agents that are being built on top of generative AI.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Well, I personally believe that this is the future. There is no way we can just run away of it. right? So this is part of a natural development because, and one interesting outcome of this process is that some people may think that with the development of agents and with the development of AI, we would have more spare time. But I don't see that at all. What I see is that a huge increase in productivity. And in many cases, including mine, we are working even more because we have more things to coordinate. But it also Changes the way that we work, because we are becoming more coordinators of a number of virtual agents and systems and processes, right? But I see this is the path forward for a number of areas.
Mike Kiniry
This is anecdotal, but I would guess that I'm hearing like, 5 or maybe even 10 times the productivity, but maybe almost twice as much of the work. So yeah, you're getting a lot more out of it, but you're not, you don't get to just sit back and watch the wheels turn. You have to work maybe even harder just to get a bunch more done.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, absolutely. The only thing is that, as I mentioned, I mean, the nature of your work changes as well.
Mike Kiniry
Absolutely. You mentioned people bringing their laptops. If they don't, is that okay?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, that's okay too. But they have to understand that all sessions are designed to be hands-on. So the instructors are really going to bring a lot of content and different tools for our audience to play with. But they will be communicated of that, right? So before, a few days before their sessions, they will be asked to bring their laptops. That information is also available in the registration pages.
Mike Kiniry
Break down the cost. It looked like it's like $199 for the trainings and $50 for the workshops, but there's some that are being offered at 50% off.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, exactly. The goal of the academy is really to provide workforce development in an affordable way. And after running some basic costs, these were the numbers that we achieved. So the workshops that are smaller, in between 1:00 and 4:00 hours, they cost $49.99 or $50. All of them had early registrations with 50% discount. We also have some promo codes. available through community, through some partners. For example, SBDC, our session here at FGCU, they have a promo code for their associates. We have with Southwest Florida Tech. So some of our partners have these promo codes. And the trainings that last longer, between 8:00 and 10 hours, they have this $199 cost. also with some early registration, 50% discounts available. One important thing about the trainings is that most of them are going to have micro-credentials associated with, as far as the participants meet the requirements of the program, which include doing a capstone project at the end, which is going to be graded by the instructor and everything. But if they are successful, they will be able to carry a badge and to share this badge with their community, employers, and even to put that in their CVs. And all our programs will have certificates, right? But only some trainings will have associated badges.
Mike Kiniry
Any discounts for students, or does that fall under the discount codes thing that you mentioned?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
For the whole FGCU community, students, staff, and faculty, the program is completely free. And if you take the whole program, all sessions, you'll see that they were organized so that there are very few simultaneous sessions. So you can basically take a full month of AI if you want. And the total worth of this full month for free is approximately $2,500 that you can do for free if you're an FGSU student, staff, or faculty.
Mike Kiniry
We have part of our goals every year as employees here are to do outside trainings. And there are some of these that could benefit some of our team members. I might share this with them.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yes, please. You're very much welcome.
Mike Kiniry
We didn't know to talk about agentic AI six months ago. If you had to speculate, and I know you probably hate this, but what realm of AI are we pushing into that you can imagine there being some development that in six months we aren't able to talk about today?
Dr. Leandro de Castro
I believe that one natural development of agentic AI is the social development and interaction of this AI agent. We had with OpenClaw some preliminary experiments on that with the development of their specific social network in which the agents were interacting.
Mike Kiniry
Agents like Facebook for AI agents to dumb it down for listeners.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Absolutely, but think about it, not constrained to a network and free on the network, on the internet, right? All these agents being able to interact among themselves and in an autonomous way and making decisions. Even a guy like me who has been in the field for so long, this sounds a little bit scary, right? But I think this is a natural trend that you'll see not far ahead.
Mike Kiniry
It would have been Star Trek five years ago. And now it's just, it's a rational speculation.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, absolutely. It's coming.
Mike Kiniry
So where can people go to learn about the academy? It kicks off on May 4th.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yes, first day of the academy is on May 4th. We are currently planning a closing ceremony in which we are going to provide the physical certificates to our participants. And we're also going to invite some members of the community and all our sponsors and partners to be together in this very nice closing ceremony.
Mike Kiniry
Well, I look forward to talking to you in six months. I will tell the team about the opportunities that are available. Dr. Leandro DeCastro is a full professor of artificial intelligence and data sciences at FGCU and founding director of FGCU's Dendritic Institute. It's good to talk to you again.
Dr. Leandro de Castro
Yeah, good to talk to you too. Thanks for having me.
Mike Kiniry
You can find a link to the FGCU AI Summer Academy website, which breaks down all the sessions on an easily accessible calendar on our website, wgcu.org slash GCL. If you missed any of the show, you can always hear all of our episodes in their entirety on our website, or you can subscribe to Gulf Coast Life as a podcast. Our show today was produced by yours truly with technical support from Jared Gonzalez. For now, thanks for listening. I'm Mike Kiniry. This is WGCU FM Fort Myers 90.1, WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM, NPR for Southwest Florida.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.
