A Manifesto for the Future of Outdoor Play Never before have games been more social, connecting millions of players across continents. Yet, never have we been more physically isolated, tethered to screens, sedentary in our living rooms. Have you thought about that? Is it due to design flaw or intentional? Gaming and Tech giants like Google, Meta, Nintendo, Apple, etc. have profited immensely from our attention. They have built empires by keeping us and our children glued to s

Making your Listeners Active Subjects Using Pre- and Post-Surveys Long lectures always face a universal challenge: maintaining engagement . While breakout sessions and Q&As help, Today I want to discuss another powerful underutilized tool that turns the audience into the subject of their own experiment: The Pre- and Post-Lecture Survey . By asking a specific set of identical questions before and after the session, you transform a standard presentation into a real-time Human F

If you are planning to give the lecture on the societal impacts of self-driving vehicles, resist the urge to just talk at  your students. I understand that you feel the responsibility to share everything you know. I was there too . For many years I gave a lecture for different audiences constantly updating materials and improving my delivery. Only this year I have decided to try something new, and I have not regretted it! The future of transportation is complex, controversial

The current technological landscape, marked by advances in AI (especially generative and multimodal models), final arrival of sophisticated wearable devices (remember Google Glasses ?), and an industry focus towards human-centric goals, presents a unique opportunity to redefine transportation.  Traditionally, transportation research has prioritized efficiency, but this new era allows for a focus on human well-being, inclusivity, safety, and personal empowerment.  MLLM illustr

Are you an educator? What are your thoughts on Large Language Models , and AI technology in general, with respect to education?  Do you think that soon (or very soon) you will be replaced? Have you tried NotebookLM AND guided learning from Google or OpenAI ? If not, try them and answer again. What do you think now? From books to AI New technologies have evolved human knowledge transfer before, slowly removing the need for constant and direct human-to-human connections du

The swift and widespread integration of Large Language Models into virtually every professional sector has created an immediate and critical need for their inclusion within university curricula. We need to incorporate them yesterday.  Universities have an obligation to guide students on their path of ethically navigating this new technology, teaching them to critically evaluate AI-generated content, understand its inherent biases, and leverage it as a powerful tool for augme

The peer review process is already a significant, often uncompensated, service to the scientific community, demanding deep expertise and considerable time, which makes performing it both quickly and accurately a formidable challenge. Surprisingly, AI proliferation in academic writing doesn't make it easier, while rapidly ruining academic writing. Will academic writing be reborn? We will see! Let’s assume it will.  The possible shift towards concise, data-driven research paper

The academic engineering paper, a cornerstone of scientific discourse, is in the midst of a profound, albeit quiet, identity crisis. Its primary author is increasingly an AI, and its most diligent reader is also an AI. Large Language Models (LLMs) now assist in drafting everything from literature reviews to methodology sections, while other algorithms parse, summarize, and categorize these papers for databases and discovery tools. In this new ecosystem, the traditional paper

In academia, using AI for grading and providing a feedback seems like a reasonable next step. I suspect that AI will manage to grade and provide valid feedback for easy to medium level of difficulty calculation problems. If it can solve it, it can grade it, right? What if the problem is not a calculation assignment? We need to test it!  Note, the privacy of my students is a major concern for me (even with the  turn off button  that instructs LLM not to save the information; a

As a professor from the engineering department, I feel that we may have an easier time adapting to the rise of generative AI compared to our colleagues in  other areas. This is because we have faced similar paradigm shifts before in previous generations, navigating disruptions that fundamentally changed how we learn and how we work. Calculators came first... We saw it first with the introduction of calculators, which were initially feared as a crutch that would atrophy our me

Choosing to undertake an internship during summer 2024 as a Ph.D. student was a decision that filled these summer three months with...