Academics Map Opportunities to Benefit from AI in Arab Universities
Millions of jobs will be automated in full or in part by artificial intelligence (AI), reports say. That’s why academics are discussing the importance of reforming and reinventing higher education to equip students and graduates with the skills needed to find a place in the labour market.
In conversations with Al-Fanar Media, several academics talked about how Arab universities can maximize the benefits of AI in higher education and avoid some of its negative effects.
Expanding Automation
In a recent article titled “Here Are 3 Ways Higher Education Can Prepare for the Generative AI Revolution”, Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, in Boston, pointed out why higher education has to adapt to the challenges AI systems present. “These systems are reinventing entire sectors. To adapt to this reinvented economy, people will need to reinvent their skills, careers—and, indeed, agency over their lives,” he wrote.
“Educating people for reinvention in this fluid context will require the reinvention of higher education itself,” he added.
“To adapt to this reinvented economy, people will need to reinvent their skills, careers—and, indeed, agency over their lives. Educating people for reinvention in this fluid context will require the reinvention of higher education itself.”
Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, in Boston
Aoun is a Lebanese-American scholar of linguistics and the author of numerous articles and books, including “Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. His recent article was published on the World Economic Forum website as a part of “The Growth Summit: Jobs and Opportunity for All”, which took place in Switzerland in May.
To explain how artificial intelligence will affect future jobs, Aoun mentioned some statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s “Future of Work” series.
“Nearly 14 percent of jobs in OECD countries are likely to be automated, while another 32 percent are at high risk of being partially automated,” he said. “Young people and those with low skills are those at highest risk—but new technological developments are now also affecting the jobs of the high-skilled too.”
In his article, he commented: “Last year, the OECD predicted that AI would ‘radically transform’ 1.1 billion jobs in the next 10 years. Given the impressive new technologies that have arrived since, this now seems like an almost bashfully conservative estimate.”
Referring to GPT-4, the new artificial intelligence language model released by the technology company OpenAI this spring, Aoun wrote: “Within days of the arrival of GPT-4, Goldman Sachs issued a report warning that the latest AI systems could automate a quarter of all the work done in the US and the eurozone, costing some 300 million jobs”.
He concluded by listing three things universities need to do to deal with AI: create a curriculum for the AI economy, design experiential programmes for the AI workplace, and reinvent the university for lifelong learning.
What Is AI?
Before going deeply into how Arab universities can benefit from artificial intelligence, we need to know more about it. “AI is a now a widespread term that has surfaced in numerous applications,” said Ahmed Elsheikh, associate dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computational Sciences at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Cairo Campus (UPEI Cairo).
“In general, AI refers to computer programs that learn to do a task that mimics [human] intelligence when provided with sufficient data. Of course, applications like face recognition like in Facebook, voice recognition like in Siri, and handwriting recognition from Samsung SPen are considered to be AI applications, although if you think of it, humans do not really require their intelligence to identify people, communicating by speech, or recognizing text,” Elsheikh told Al-Fanar Media.
Elsheikh gave another example. “The current booming trend is large language models that are able to review massive amounts of data and generate them back when asked to do so. This is closer to AI than other applications, yet if you ask a human to explain why he or she responded in a way, they can do so. Language models cannot.”
In Arab Universities
Artificial intelligence is already affecting many fields taught at universities, said Jürgen Schmidhuber, director of the AI Initiative at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
“Arab universities and many others … will focus on building AI tools for good and educating people about the benefits of AI. Humanity is going to profit immensely from AI, and we should look forward to this.”
Jürgen Schmidhuber, director of the AI Initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
“The artificial neural networks developed in my labs are not only on billions of smartphones and used billions of times per day, they are also enabling thousands of healthcare applications,” he said. “For example, for diagnosis of arrhythmia, cardiovascular disease risk factors prediction, medical image segmentation, detection of radiological abnormalities, diabetes detection, lung cancer detection, tumor tracking, breast cancer detection from histopathological images, protein structure prediction, pandemic forecasting, Covid-19 detection, Covid-19 prediction, and many more,” he said.
Schmidhuber, who is also scientific director of the Swiss artificial intelligence lab IDSIA, gave many more examples on how AI is used in universities, including molecule design, “document classification to unclog courts, evaluating the rationality of judicial decisions, lip reading, mapping brain signals to speech, predicting what’s going on in nuclear fusion reactors.”
His list also included stock market prediction, self-driving cars, predictive maintenance, smart grid applications, sustainable management of energy in microgrids, traffic congestion prediction, analysis and prediction of water quality, air pollution forecasting, forecasting under complicated weather conditions, climate change assessment studies on droughts and floods, and education, tutoring, and teaching. “Actually, it’s getting harder and harder to find fields that are not affected by AI,” Schmidhuber said.
Evaluating Student Learning
Neamat Elgayar, director of the Centre of Excellence in Applied Artificial Intelligence in the School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University Dubai, talked about how artificial intelligence can be used to improve student learning.
“Not every student gets the attention and educational approach they need at times. Using artificial intelligence, learning can be adapted to each student’s individual needs, goals and abilities.”
Neamat Elgayar, director of the Centre of Excellence in Applied Artificial Intelligence at Heriot-Watt University Dubai
“Each student has a different mentality, learns at a different pace and has different interests and preferences,” she said. “For this reason, not every student gets the attention and educational approach they need at times. Using artificial intelligence, learning can be adapted to each student’s individual needs, goals and abilities.”
AI-based technologies can monitor students’ interaction with course materials and their progress in learning, “and thus close gaps in education and learning,” Elgayar said.
Using AI tools in the individual assessment of students helps avoid bias, Elgayar said. “At Heriot-Watt Dubai, we have taken it upon ourselves to provide students with an exceptional learning experience and state-of-the-art technological tools, while respecting regulations and laws and reducing the harm of misuse of these modern tools, while encouraging students and professors to make the most of the advantages of advanced technology.”
Complementing, Not Replacing, Human Input
Reem Bahgat, president of Egypt University of Informatics, also thinks artificial intelligence will support improvements in the ability to evaluate students, provide feedback and create hypotheses for scientific tests similar to what humans can.
“Artificial intelligence will not make universities reduce faculty members, research or administration, and may lead to employing more. … Artificial intelligence will complement human scientific input rather than replace it.”
Reem Bahgat, president of Egypt University of Informatics
She also sees other areas where Arab universities could benefit from AI, such as by using smart systems to help develop the university’s business activities and improve performance. “They can also participate in research on artificial intelligence and its various topics, especially with regard to the Arabic language,” Bahgat said.
But using AI tools does not mean AI will replace humans, she added.
“Artificial intelligence will not make universities reduce faculty members, research or administration, and may lead to employing more,” she said. She believes that “artificial intelligence will complement human scientific input rather than replace it, so there will be real cooperation between man and machine, which results in a mixture advanced skill.”
Challenges and Negative Effects
How best to integrate promising AI techniques with human interaction and face-to-face learning remains a challenge, several educators said. They acknowledged potentially negative effects of artificial intelligence and discussed some solutions for getting the most out of it.
“The challenge can be the misuse or overuse of such AI applications that can come in the way of the core essence of education,” said Elsheikh, of UPEI Cairo. “University graduates must understand the how and why so that they can later on build their own knowledge. Otherwise, the more reliant students become on such technology, the less they will be able to improve it.”
Elgayar, of the applied artificial intelligence centre at Heriot-Watt University Dubai, noted some of the challenges in the development of artificial intelligence tools to evaluate student learning.
“There are some steps that ensure optimal use of these tools, especially in the assessment of students,” she said. “First, the capabilities of these tools and platforms must be understood and their impact on the teaching and learning process absorbed. Professors must understand regulations and laws that limit knowledge thefts, and tools that can be used to detect any breach of rules and violators.”
She added: “Teachers and university professors must determine the objectives of each programme and specialisation, and work to identify evaluation mechanisms based on the nature of the programme or curriculum.”
Elsheikh said, “Humans must learn from their past. Whenever they develop something to assume better, or higher, or faster means of living, issues of the same magnitude appear. For example, inventing the internet resulted in hacking and privacy invasion, inventing cars resulted in accidents and pollution.”
There are endless other examples in food technology and other fields, he added. “Hence, AI applications must be handled with care. Studies should focus more on the adverse effects of AI on the core essence of education, and how it might produce less capable graduates who might be unable to improve the very same technology they rely upon,” he added.
Reem Bahgat pointed out that the problem for universities is twofold: To be reasonable in their expectations of what smart systems can do for them, and to guard against students’ misuse of artificial intelligence applications.
Elgayar said universities could discourage cheating by asking students to explain their thinking or research process as part of evaluations of their work.
“These personal experiences are things that AI tools cannot do or reproduce,” she said. “This will also support students’ learning process and their learning process will become more unique.”
Schmidhuber, of the AI Initiative at KAUST, said: “Unfortunately, one cannot always prevent bad human actors from using widely accessible technology like AI tools for their own ends. However, the same AI tools can also be used against the bad actors.
“Arab universities and many others will learn to do this. They will focus on building AI tools for good and educating people about the benefits of AI. Humanity is going to profit immensely from AI, and we should look forward to this.”
Related Reading
- Job Skills in Demand: Insights from the World Economic Forum
- Future Jobs and Skills Gaps: An Al-Fanar Media Panel Discussion
- Chatbot Tutors: How Students and Educators Can Get the Most from These Tools
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