Appendix

Background

UWM’s Generative AI Task Force was sponsored in December 2023 by Provost Andrew Daire and Vice Chancellor Robin van Harpen (referred to as “Executive Sponsors” from now on). The taskforce had three goals:

  1. Assess how AI and Generative AI (GAI) are being used by faculty, students and staff.
  2. Identify and introduce platforms and applications that will ensure that UWM keeps pace with developments in GAI.
  3. Recommend support and training services that would be needed to facilitate wide adoption and use of GAI at UWM.

The complete taskforce charter is included in Appendix B. The taskforce was chaired by Scott Genung, Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO, and Purush Papatla, NMDSI Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of NMDSI. The Co-Chairs were also joined by Chief Innovation and Partnership Officer, Brian Thompson, as the Chancellor’s representative in planning and completing the work of the taskforce (Brian is also included in any reference to “Chairs” in the rest of this report).

The Chairs identified six areas of focus and invited faculty and staff with the most experience in each area to form a working group. Each workgroup was requested to assess current and potential uses of GAI related to the area and submit a report to the Chairs. All workgroups were also requested to select a Chair to lead its work. The Chairs next met with each workgroup Chair to develop a charter for the workgroup and set up a Planning Team that included the Chairs and the Workgroup Chairs to meet periodically to review progress and disseminate each workgroup’s findings so far to all six workgroups. Each workgroup and its goals (as described in its charter) are briefly listed in alphabetical order below for context:

  • Business Operations: To “identify, prototype, and showcase capabilities where AI-based technologies can optimize or enhance how work gets done so that staff can focus on other, more important tasks.”
  • Education and Curriculum: “To identify, prototype, and showcase capabilities where (1) AI-based technologies can enhance teaching and learning activities (2) while infusing AI literacy into the curriculum to better prepare students for the emerging workforce.”
  • Infrastructure and Data: To “develop and implement a proposal for the environment required to prototype, showcase, and pilot capabilities where AI-based technologies are needed” and “identifying opportunities to enhance, optimize, or enhance IT Operations through these technologies.”
  • Research: “To identify, prototype, and showcase capabilities where (1) AI-based technologies can accelerate research activities, enhance collaboration, and improve research outcomes (2) while enhancing research conducted upon AI technologies where possible.”
  • Responsible Use: To “develop an initial set of recommendations that will guide how UWM can provide oversight for the ethical and just implementation and evolution of emerging AI technologies.”
  • Student Success: Rather than working from a charter, this workgroup focused on understanding “how students perceive and/or want to use AI.”

The membership of each workgroup is included in Appendix C.

While the workgroups worked on defining the services and capabilities necessary for the use of GAI in their focal areas, the Chairs worked in parallel to identify, assess, and shortlist commercial GAI vendors who could best deliver those services and capabilities. In addition, through the professional networks of Scott Genung, they also met with IT administrators at a few universities (New York University, University of Michigan, University of Washington – St. Louis, and University of Wisconsin-Madison) to learn about how they helped introduce and expand the use of GAI at their universities. These meetings not only yielded valuable insights into the do’s and don’ts of bringing GAI into everyday use at large universities like UWM but also resulted in offers of collaboration and assistance. In addition, they also:

  • Hosted two town halls to inform faculty, students, and staff on the taskforce’s work and findings.
  • Made a presentation on GAI and the work of the taskforce to the staff of Division of Finance and Administrative Affairs.
  • Met with the Executive Sponsors monthly to appraise them of the taskforce’s progress.
  • Constituted a Planning Team consisting of the Chairs and all six Workgroup Chairs. The Planning Team met about every six to eight weeks to review progress and facilitate exchanges of experiences and learnings across workgroups.

Findings by Workgroups

Four of the six workgroups surveyed current and prospective users in their focal areas to discover ongoing and desired uses of GAI. The four groups included: (1) Business Operations (2) Education and Curriculum (3) Research (4) Student Success.

Each workgroup used a combination of approaches to identify how GAI is being utilized at UWM in their focal area and, where relevant, also gather examples of uses at other universities. The Education and Curriculum workgroup, for instance, conducted a survey inviting faculty and students to describe their use of GAI and drew upon previous work done by the Center for Educational Technology and Learning (CETL) cataloging use of AI in teaching.

Of the other two workgroups, the Responsible Use workgroup, relied on literature in scholarly and news media, publications by firms like Microsoft, and documents published by other universities, to research responsible uses of AI. The Infrastructure and Data workgroup took on the role of regularly reviewing ongoing findings and recommendations from the four workgroups that conducted surveys, and the Responsible Use workgroup, to assess the current infrastructure and data capabilities at UWM and help tailor the discussions of the taskforce’s Chairs with vendors of GAI.