Latest / Azadeh and Guy on AI / From Coursework to Career

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From Coursework to Career · Azadeh and Guy on AI

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Hello everyone.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the ninth episode of Azadev on AI.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: We are so excited.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: We are in season three and today we have a guest.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: We are interviewing Mr. Omid Tarashtwal.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Omid has recently defended his master's thesis and he's in the Department
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: of Agricultural Economics.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: And my co-host is...
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a professor in the program for innovative learning technologies.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I almost forgot what I did for a living.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Omid, do you want to introduce yourself?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm Omid Tarashtwal and I just wrapped up my master's degree in agricultural economics.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I come from Afghanistan.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, this is my second master's degree.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are you collecting them?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Life is forcing me to do so.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: What was the first one?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the first one was my graduate program in Development Economics in France.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I would say I'm an early career researcher and my research focuses at
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: the intersection of development economics, climate change and agriculture.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Or in other words,
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: now I'm looking at what is the interplay between the hot topic of climate change.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And how we reflect climate change within rural livelihood,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: how it is affecting the farmers' decision-making, the mobility of climate migration.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm moving between international development and And environmental sustainability
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: in agriculture.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: And just for audience, I mean,
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Omid talked about all of those hot topics and important topics,
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: but Omid is also a good friend of mine and he's been doing a lot with AI.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure he can explain it much better than me.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm...
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: When I look at my own academic and professional life,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: I always look for things to bypass the standard procedures.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: For example, if my professional... Love your honesty.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: My professor is asking me for
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: task and he or she is predicting
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: a month time interval for that specific task.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Before dividing that task and breaking it into small pieces,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: broadly speaking,
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: what I'm doing at first step is looking for some tools that I need to,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of timing, that how can I do this in a sharp way?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: That tool for me is AI.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that,
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: one of the goals that I have pursued very serious in my master's degree
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: in US was professional development.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing I used AI and the seal I'm doing is that I give AI
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: a broad background of my own.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Omid with master's degree in development economics and now writing up my thesis.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: So my focus in the career is getting to the market,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: stepping into the market in academia or NGOs.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like non-profits linked to research or international development or industry
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: that they're doing work at the intersection of food, climate and all these things.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm asking AI,
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: go Do an extensive search online and bring in the short courses,
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: the opportunities that I can attend,
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: learn and put it back on my CV,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: showing my interest in my field and at the same time highlighting my passion
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: for learning.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And using this technique,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I attended Harvard,
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oxford, Yale for their intensive and short-term courses.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: So what I'm trying to say with this example is that I use AI as a tool to streamline my work.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: For example,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: in this specific example,
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: in the absence of AI,
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I should have done different keyword search within different search engines and
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: then looking at that specific organization to see what are they offering.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: So AI is, I think, that tool that it can help you to make informed decisions and wise decisions.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that you recently attended a kind of workshop.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Was it a workshop or a scholarship at Harvard?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was a funded intensive course for development practitioners.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And Harvard is...
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: They have a...
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: They have an academy, Harvard Humanitarian Academy.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: They train people like early career,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: mid-career development practitioners,
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: people who are active in education,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: like big names like UNICEF and Oxfam Project,
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: other big names that they're doing development projects with a focus on education.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Or sanitation, or public policy and good governance, different aspects of development projects.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that was one of the programs that I got the scholarship using AI cert.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that was my next question.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: I was going to ask if you use AI to find that kind of opportunity.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think I don't have the academic authority to
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: show how AI is efficient.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you use, for example, in this way, it's going to be more efficient or not.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: But my own experiences.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you're giving a lot of context to that chatbot,
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: like giving the background that you carry in terms of research,
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of professional and work experience,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: and more importantly, what you're looking for, then in that case, Yeah.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then I asked AI that,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: so industry aside,
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: industry and academia aside,
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I might look for stepping into the humanitarian- Organizations.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, market.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And with all these cut off the budget in the international development.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to bring in some big names in my CV like Harvard,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oxford or other reliable institutions and go look for some courses which is focused
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: on humanitarian side,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: but more of a practical or practical
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Or direct experience from the field rather
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: than working with data, which I already acquired.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then it came with some recommendations,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: which one of them was that Harvard humanitarian course,
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: some courses which was funded by United Nations, by UN.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: So what I'm trying to...
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Contextual information.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Then AI is going to brought in the exact thing that you're looking for.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if I would ask AI that Go bring in some humanitarian course for me.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then the most important thing within the humanitarian context when people are going
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: to learn is monitoring and evaluation.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it kind of goes there and bringing some monitoring and evaluation courses.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really important the extent of information that you're sharing.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: So it spits out good information, but it is not accurately what you're looking for.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this connects to something that I've been thinking about as we're preparing for
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: a new school year just this coming year.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I've started thinking about what is happening in graduate education.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that to prepare The next generation of professionals,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: whether at the master's level,
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: definitely at the doctoral level,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: we have to give them a skill set to build that platform of AI.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've never thought about The professional development,
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: like I want to develop and I don't want to contain myself to this institution.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've always recommended to people when they can is go to a conference and take one
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: of the workshops or participate in something that will give you some skill.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: But this goes next level.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I love that idea.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's definitely something I'm taking.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm done for now.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because there are always brilliant opportunities that you're not update about.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if you're not looking for them yourself.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you know somebody, you might know about something and you throw it somebody's way.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a much more consistent way to think about this,
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: regardless of who your advisor is and what their channels of communications are.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a phenomenal idea.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that you have used AI a lot for...
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Doing your coursework, your academic work for writing papers.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Could you walk us through your process?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the tricky one.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: So
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: within the grad school,
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: we should be really cautious about using AI.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: And if someone asked me why, the short answer is the critical thinking.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: For example,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: there are some moments that pop up in my own life that I encounter
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: with some basic equations or basic questions.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't have the, I would say, the capacity to get focused and generate my own question.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: I prefer to give it to AI.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first thing,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: that if someone is using AI,
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: For the coursework,
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: either it's learning, doing assignments or wrapping up the projects.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: You should use it in a way that is not hurting.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of the day, you are submitting something to the advisor.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're going to accept or they're going to ask you to revise.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: But that moment of focusing on the work,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: it's going to be misused and lost if you're not taking something with yourself.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's my own experience.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because at the end of the day,
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: no one is questioning you about very much firmly or risklessly why you use AI
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: or why you didn't.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because there is no universal pattern to catch it or to...
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the thing.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Personally...
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Within the first semester, I was trying to use AI mostly for wrapping up my things.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I was telling myself, let's do this assignment.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when it's done, I'm going to focus on learning myself.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I wouldn't do that at all.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I never did that.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: So instead, I tried to focus on learning when I was doing the assignment.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: I had a course in the second semester, Data Science for Agriculture.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And social sciences.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So before that course,
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was never familiar with the coding within R.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm able to clean the data,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: to make indexes,
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: to build an analysis-ready dataset and make the regression,
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: bringing in the insight, visualize the insights.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about the course that you took in the statistics department?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, that was kind of similar to this.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: That was computing tools for a statistician.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: That was also R and Python.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's why, yeah.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're asking the code for visualizing,
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: you're asking the code for giving you the table, for giving you
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: The OLS regression equation for giving you how to filter, how to clean your data.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: All these codes are available.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: But what I was doing is when I was asking for the code, I was trying to write it myself.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was not usable, but at least I was using the right function.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was...
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Teaching myself using AI,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: how I'm doing this,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: how I'm constructing that cycle,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: when I put function,
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: when I put the, how I'm writing that string, making that string ready for a run.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: to sum it up in this part,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: for doing the coursework,
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: we can use AI While we know that it's not hurting
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: the learning stream.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: As far as your learning, it's really fine.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, personally, as I said, as you know, I come from Afghanistan.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Asking lots of basic questions in the course is hurting.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not in line with our culture.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: It seems you are kind of questioning the dignity of the professor.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Same here in my country, Iran.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I was afraid to ask some stupid questions from my side.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And AI is there.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: I have my AI open in my course when the professor was saying data wrangling.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was feeling ashamed to ask the professor, what do you mean by data wrangling?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I was doing basic asking questions so I can follow the professor accordingly.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess you're not alone.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: I've been in many classes and I've seen students while the professor is talking,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: they just go over ChatGPT and they ask all of those questions.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: The questions that you are mostly embarrassed to just raise your hand and ask the question.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: So you are not alone in this.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And our data,
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: so we collected data from the School of
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Engineering,
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: and they're saying the same thing.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Students are saying, even if they're not coming from a different culture.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, there's a rodeo in town, so if you want to see some wrangling, that's crazy.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Real wrangling, just saying.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Let me see.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a kind of, I mean, could be a weird question.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: So if you could fast forward 10 years,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: what is one AI application that you hope becomes commonplace
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: because it genuinely improves people's lives?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: I would pick early warning applications for AI.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: For farmers, for rural population.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: We have some kind of foundations for this because in
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: the disaster management There are countries,
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: there are counties that are getting lots of development in terms of
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: how to notify
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: the people in terms of future crisis.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing about AI is I think with this,
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: with the current movements,
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're going to reach a level in terms of disaster management
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: that we can enable farmers to have an application
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: that it's telling them
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: you're going to face a severe drought.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's the reason that we should
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we care about impact.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Either it's science in the academia or in the policy side or in the industry,
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: we care about the impact.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And AI is
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Facilitating the process of finding that trends and pattern
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: so it can forecast what's going on next.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you're doing that properly,
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: quality data and using AI quality spotting the trends,
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: then we can enable farmers to get a better sense of their crop yields,
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: their soil moisture.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the rainfall.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that early warning system that I hope that AI is kind of leveling up,
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: that going to be a great development.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Although I have to say about this question that 10 years in AI is a very long time.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Considering how far we've come.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Changes day by day.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: We are actually going to have you back for another episode
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: because we've got some questions about things you're doing.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you, everybody.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll see you next time on Azadeh and Guy.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: On AI.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me.