USF Launches AI Major

“AI is changing how organizations make decisions, deliver services, develop products, and solve problems in every area, including healthcare, technology, education, and law,” said David Guy Brizan, associate professor and department chair. “We prepare students to lead this field with both technical expertise and a strong sense of responsibility.”

The new AI program prepares students to hit the ground running, Brizan said. “With skills in machine learning, data science, and AI development, you can work as an AI engineer, machine learning engineer, AI researcher, interaction engineer, data engineer, knowledge engineer, or AI software developer. Essentially, you can automate the boring parts of any work so that you can get to the fun parts.”

Brizan added that these AI jobs aren’t just in-demand and high-paying; they’re critical for society. “We have a chance to build this technology and use it in a way that serves all of us instead of just some of us.”

He speaks from experience.

“A few years ago I was a knowledge engineer at a tech company whose name I won’t mention, and I found that one of the company’s algorithms was biased,” Brizan said. “It was performing really poorly on a certain population — people who spoke English in a certain way.”

Brizan raised a red flag and urged his employer to address the bias built into the algorithm. “This is all part of what I’m talking about when it comes to AI and a USF Jesuit education in ethics and in critical thinking,” he said. “If I can speak to an AI and it understands me whether my accent is standard American English or Scottish or Jamaican or whatever, that means that whatever benefits we reap from a given system will spread out to everyone.”

USF students begin building human-centric AI systems early in the program, Brizan said. As they progress, they work with data, scalable systems, and emerging AI applications. He also encourages them to join campus organizations such as the SF AI Club, Women in Technology, and Compsigh, “a club for meeting cool people and building cool things.”

In their senior year, AI majors “do a team-based capstone project, where classmates solve a real-world challenge,” Brizan said. “We literally bring local companies to USF and they assign real projects to students, in both AI and in computer science. A sponsor from each company meets with the students each week. It’s an actual project that will see the light of day, so by the time you graduate, you already have real work experience."