The Computer Science (CS) department in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing and Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University hosted a campus- and community-wide evening discussion on AI, Deepseek, and the Future of Generative AI on Tuesday, February 25.
The goal of this outreach event was to provide an accessible introduction to recent innovations, challenges, and applications of these trending technologies to the community as well as to foster connections and collaborations with local industry and community members.
Christopher Jermaine, chair of the CS department at Rice, moderated the event. The 4-member panel consisted of the following Rice CS faculty members – Hanjie Chen, Xia Ben Hu, Vincente Ordoñez, and Anshumali Shrivastava.
The event, held on the Rice campus in Duncan Hall’s McMurtry auditorium, was attended by 200 people. The audience consisted of Rice students, faculty, and staff, as well as many industry and community members.
“It is a testament to the level of excitement around generative AI that we'd get such a large turnout for a semi-technical discussion of a recent technology. Everyone understands how important this technology is. Not only did we have great participation from the Rice community, but from the Houston industry as well," Jermaine said.
The event commenced with tutorials by Shrivastava on artificial intelligence/large language models and Hu on Deepseek. These were followed by a panel discussion on recent innovations, applications, and potential challenges posed by these technologies, a question-and-answer session where the panelists answered questions from the audience, and a reception.
In addition to lay-friendly discussions on how emerging AI models such as ChatGPT and Deepseek function and how they can be further refined to possess human-like reasoning capabilities, the panelists also addressed broader themes of how generative AI will continue to revolutionize and impact various aspects of our lives in a multitude of ways.