Sixty University of Arizona students tapped the latest in artificial intelligence over the summer to solve real-world problems for real clients – creating specialized chatbots, virtual reality experiences and new potential for transforming the shopping experience, tourism, language learning, health care and more. 

The students are members of the inaugural cohort of the AI Core + Design Lab Summer Internship. Partnering with local employers, the program employs and mentors students in a fast-paced, startup environment, teaching them to use AI tools that are reshaping how we work, and to recognize new opportunities and applications for the rapidly evolving technology. 

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"The internship is an intense but super-fun experiential learning program that rapidly introduces University of Arizona students to AI technologies. We're building solutions for our researchers and commercial partners using technology that is evolving right before our eyes," said Ash Black, director of the university's AI Core, a program that gives students opportunities to explore AI applications in the workplace. "It's all learning by doing in a fast-paced, startup environment. It's pretty hard work, but the maturation comes fast, and the students are more than capable of getting the job done.”

The students will demonstrate the results of their work on Aug. 9 during the AI Core + Design Lab Summer Internship Showcase, which will take place from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. in Room 605 of the Health Sciences Innovation Building. 

The AI Core + Design Lab internship is a collaboration between the university's Institute for Computation and Data-Enabled Insight and Student Engagement and Career Development, with support from the University Center for Assessment, Teaching and Technology and the College of Health Sciences. 

"We're really excited and proud to be showcasing what can happen at this university when a lot of us pull together," Black said. "There is tremendous creativity and talent that surfaces in a collaboration like this." 

AI Core will continue into the 2024-25 academic year, supporting innovative projects and solutions for university faculty and partners. Design Lab offers paid internships within Student Engagement and Career Development, immersing interdisciplinary teams of students in creative problem solving for real clients.

The interns – a mix of undergraduates and graduates from 10 different colleges – worked on 12 projects throughout the summer. They developed chatbots with domain-specific RAG (retrieval augmented generation) databases that provide company-specific insights and advice. They created a resume AI that can understand job seekers' profiles and personalities and then pair them up with opportunities. They deployed a chatbot that helps delayed-learning toddlers with language acquisition in a wide variety of languages. The interns also used AI for medical simulations and created lifelike human avatars powered by ChatGPT, among other projects.

"The work between AI Core and Design Lab has proven to be very insightful this summer. Our interns worked very hard to learn about design thinking, coding, AI and other technological experiences. Many of these students have very little to no knowledge or experience, and through our combined efforts, students not only learned rapidly but the products they delivered have been incredible," said Patrick Halvorsen, a student staff member and a senior student mentor with Student Engagement and Career Development. "The mentorship team between AI Core and Design Lab has fostered friendships and bonds that will undeniably be shared for time to come."

On-the-job training

Using artificial intelligence is not brand new – think facial recognition to open your phone, Google searches, Alexa or Siri. But with the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, a suite of generative AI tools became more accessible, bringing both opportunities and challenges.

"I think we all understand at this point that AI is an extremely transformative technology.  The structures that will define the next world are being discovered and invented right now," Black said. "We are keeping up by empowering our youth. We pair them up with our faculty and educators, who impart wisdom and domain knowledge, producing a new kind of workforce." 

Clients included Pima Community College, the city of Tucson, the Pima County Visitors Center, Joyful Jobs recruiting agency and the Play District, which offers a resource for families and tourists to plan and find local activities. University clients included CATalyst Studios; the Norton School of Human Ecology; the Eller College of Management; Mary Alt, professor and head of the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; and Matthew Briggs, professor of health sciences design.

Kicking off on June 3, the internship offered a four-week, in-depth training on custom generative pre-trained transformers, or GPTs, to master prompt engineering – inputting the right information into an AI tool, such as ChatGPT, to get desired responses. Interns also learned other essential AI skills, such as web application programming interface – or API – development to hone their coding and programming skills, and generative AI for graphic design. 

The students spent the remainder of the internship working in teams on their projects, interacting with clients. They applied their skills laterally, with engineers, developers, marketers and other specialists applying their areas of expertise across projects for a more efficient process. They used the instant messaging social platform Discord to communicate rapidly, sharing ideas and applications of interest to other teams, and worked in an office setting on the sixth floor of the Health Sciences Innovation Building.

Jackson Grove, a junior majoring in information science, has worked as an AI engineer at AI Core since fall 2023 and helped lead the summer internship program. Grove, who worked on custom chatbots over the summer, said he plans to continue working for AI Core until he graduates. 

"There aren't many places where you get to work with technologies so new and cutting-edge that every week they change completely," Grove said. "Not only is the AI space

exciting in itself, but at AI Core and this summer internship you're able to build first-of-their-kind applications with exceptionally talented people," Grove said. "We make an impact for businesses and all our partners, which feels pretty great, all while learning the technology which only builds our own skillsets in preparation for joining the workforce."

Jay Sampson, project manager in the Lundgren Consumer Science Lab in the Norton School of Human Ecology and a summer internship client, said the interns were able to fast-track a project that involves creating a digital twin – a virtual representation of the physical world – of the lab's state-of-the-art retail laboratory. The digital twin is a replica of the physical lab that is opening in the McClelland Park building and offers students and faculty an opportunity to study store optimization based on actual consumer activity.

"Their efforts have been nothing short of remarkable, and once this digital twin gets integrated within a variety of course curricula, students of the retail and consumer sciences major will have a virtual environment where students and faculty can analyze and visualize in-store activity, as well as run simulations to test different scenarios around merchandising and store design optimization," Sampson said.