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Irina Benedyk,
Assistant Professor
CSEE Department
University at Buffalo


Instead of a Lecture on Self-Driving Vehicle Impacts, Do This!
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
birina
Nov 1, 20259 min read


Needed Human-Centric Transportation Research In Light of Technological Advances and Industry Messaging
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
birina
Aug 22, 20254 min read


Use of LLM Arena for easy to medium level engineering problems
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
birina
Jul 6, 20254 min read


Re-engineering the Research Paper for the AI Era
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
birina
May 31, 20255 min read


Using LLM for grading
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
birina
Mar 31, 20255 min read


If you embrace AI in your teaching…
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
birina
Sep 17, 20244 min read
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