HELLO FUTURE: AI 101 -- The Future of College in the Age of AI

What happens when the classroom itself becomes intelligent? In this episode, Kevin Cirilli sits down with Dr. John Licato, associate professor at the University of South Florida and director of the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping higher education. From handwritten quizzes to AI-powered study assistants, Kevin and Dr. Licato discuss the launch of the new Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing — Florida’s first AI-named college — and what it means for the next generation of students. Can universities preserve critical thinking in the age of ChatGPT? How should professors grade essays written with AI help? And what happens when technology starts teaching the teachers? It’s a conversation about the collision between innovation and education — and the race to build a smarter kind of classroom.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
What happens when the college classroom becomes intelligent. Doctor John
Locato is an associate professor at the University of South Florida.
He's also the director of the Advancing Machine and Human
Reasoning Lab, and he explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping
higher education. Did the kids need the blue books anymore?

(00:29):
Or do they just need the chatchypte? Hello Future, It's
me keV and this is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier,
and today we're talking all things AI one oh one
and the future of higher education in college. My name
is Kevin Sarrilli, and yeah, let's just dive right into it.
I was just speaking at Penn State, my ma alma mater, John,

(00:49):
and it is really interesting. I told the students, embrace AI.
When you're on your job interviews, you should say that
you're using AI because a lot of us older people
aren't using it as efficiently or as effectively as you.
How is AI changing the college experience for the students.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, it's almost easier to ask how it's not changing
the college experience? Right. Every single course has to deal
with this in some way. Every single professor, every single field,
and my courses I've switched all of the quizzes that
we do to in person. We do a weekly in
person quiz twenty minutes at the start of the Tuesday class.
And you know, there's a little bit of resistance from

(01:26):
some students to going back to that old pen and
paper style of writing, but I mean that's how it's
got to be, right.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
So, first particular with students in your research, in particular,
what are you studying and what are you finding about
how artificial intelligence is changing the college experience for them
because it's changing the economy, so it obviously would have
to change how we're teaching our kids.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, there's the positives, right. It makes it so that
finding information is significantly easier than it was even with Google.
So I use it for my research. I'll use it
for if I just have a question that I need
answered and I want to make sure I limit it
to academic sources only. I'll just go to Perplexity and
do a deep search and then limit it to you know,
exclude social media as answers and you know, and it'll

(02:12):
synthesize it do essentially a mini literature review, which is
something that would have taken me a week to do myself,
I can just do it in three minutes.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
So you've started a new college, which I think is
a is a great example of how AI is creating
new spaces, creating new economies. Tell us about the decision
to create a new college at this school and what
exactly it does and the thought process behind it and
how it's reshaping education for a hire it.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah. Here at USF, we realized a couple of years
ago that artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and computing in general, this
is something that's too big to be contained within just
one department. So we started moving towards a bigger organization.
And then we got a very generous donation from Arnie
Bellini forty million dollars, largest donation in the history of USF,

(03:00):
and that allowed us to establish this college, the Bellini
College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing, officially launching this semester,
and we're structuring it as kind of a hub and
spoke model, right. We're making it so that the idea
is AI is not going to be just contained to
one college. And you know, it's got to be like
computers were, every single department, every single job on Earth

(03:23):
is going to use computer or uses computers in some way,
and we think AI and cybersecurity are going to have
that same kind of reach, so we want to make
it easier for them to do that.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
So how is it changing, though, how the kids are learning?
Because you guys, you know, I was reading on the
local news in South Florida. The shift is so significant
that the school has rebranded the entire computer science department
into the College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing, which is,
you know, now there's a college for Artificial intelligence. So
should young people be looking to specialize in AI? Because

(03:56):
you know, I interviewed last week the head economist of
the World Bank who said, the more exposed you are
to AI, in many ways, less likely you are to
be eclipsed by AI. Is that kind of meshing with
what you're finding?

Speaker 2 (04:06):
I think that's true. The college enables us to create
those new programs. We have the traditional computer science degrees,
of course, but now we have a bachelor's in AI,
Masters in AI, We're going to offer a PhD in AI.
It also allows us to offer certificate programs to the
public for people that you know, already have their full
time jobs and they just want to upscill and get

(04:29):
that exposure to what AI prompting is and how to
do it properly. So yeah, it absolutely shifts education in
the sense that it provides new opportunities, but it also
gives us the ability to connect with more traditional educational offerings.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Do you think that eventually though, in the future what
role are professors? Are professors needed or is it all
just more online learning? How does that work? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Absolutely. I think what a lot of people don't fully
understand is that at a research university, especially, the job
of professors is not just to teach. That's a big
part of their job, but research professors are creating new knowledge.
We're trying to advance the frontier of what human understanding
is in general. So the university doesn't just share knowledge,

(05:14):
it creates it, it discovers it, and that role is
still going to exist.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Awesome. Well, thank you so much John Lecatto for breaking
us down on how artificial intelligence is going to be
evolving colleges. Now there's a college of AI. Who knew?
Thanks Sean