Learning AI ‘From Its Core’: Inside Professor Tinglong Dai’s Course At Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

The growth of artificial intelligence and its wholehearted embrace by business higher education has surprised even those who have long studied it. Count among them Professor Tinglong Dai, who teaches a first-of-its-kind MBA course at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School called Data Science: Artificial Intelligence.

“The practical use of AI is so new,” says Dai, who joined the Carey Business School in 2013 and has since been working with AI, well before its explosion into the mainstream in 2022. “I remember attending an AI conference in LA in 2010, when most people outside of academia would ask me ‘what is AI?’ when I told them about the conference,” he says.

Dai knew AI would be big — but he didn’t think the technology would explode at this rate. “This is really shocking. Within two years, seeing half of my students listing AI expertise on their LinkedIn is shocking,” he says.

WHAT’S COVERED IN THE COURSE?

The moment when Dai thought, “This stuff is getting real. This is really exciting” came in 2018, when the FDA approved the first AI device for clinical use: IDx-DR, a diagnostic tool used for diabetic retinopathy screening — the leading cause of blindness in adults in the U.S.

Dai’s Artificial Intelligence course is crucial for students — now more than ever. It is part of the Carey School’s core curriculum, required for all full-time MBAs since 2021, which is also the year Dai was named a best 40 under 40 professor. In January, the Carey School named him its first Bernard T. Ferrari professor, after the school’s dean emeritus.

In his course, Dai incorporates lessons from what he has learned over many years of learning about healthcare analytics, human-AI interactions, and global supply chains. His students all have varying levels of experience with AI, but Dai says that is the beauty of the community at the Carey School: The students all help each other learn.

ATTENTION IS ALL YOU NEED

There are three main parts to his course. The first is understanding the math and the basics behind AI technology. Setting the foundation is really important so that students can understand the basics of AI and learn how the neural network works. “You can read hundreds of articles on AI,” says Dai, “but you can’t understand AI unless you know it from its core.”

“Behind Chat GPT is a transformer,” Dai explains. The session on generative AI begins with discussing the paper Attention Is All You Need to understand the mechanics of the transformer, the title inspired by the Beatles’ song, All You Need Is Love.

The next part of the course is gaining a computational foundation, where students use Python — the language of AI.

“It used to be very difficult to learn, but not anymore,” Dai says. “With the help of ChatGPT and help from interdisciplinary classmates, students are set up for success.” He commends ChatGPT for helping save students thousands of hours watching YouTube videos to solve problems in Python like they used to have to do.

The last part of the course is allotted to business insights, which includes the project Dai calls the AI Lab, where MBAs learn how to translate AI into real world applications with partners from the industry.

Students jump right into their roles as emerging experts in AI. “The best way to get them involved is really to make them a part of what is going on right now.”

Carey offers a workgroup on AI and Healthcare that Dai co-chairs, a community of about 100 people, mostly physicians. They also have guest speakers in the healthcare and finance sectors from Harvard, Mayo Clinic, and more to inform students on what they are currently doing in the industry.

THE CHAIN OF EVENTS TO TEACHING THE COURSE

A few years back, when Carey was revamping their curriculum, Dai was on the committee. Recognizing the relevance and the rate at which AI was emerging, he told his colleagues, “We can’t be a legitimate MBA program if we don’t have AI.”

The team agreed it should be included in the curriculum, and because this was his wheelhouse, they invited him to teach the course.

During the first year, the best way to describe the first cohort of MBA students who took this course is that they were both excited but also scared. “They thought – will we be able to do this?” says Dai.

Having a very interdisciplinary school like the Carey School of Business to back him plays a huge factor in supporting this course. “We are a very flexible Business School who have the capacity to absorb changes and new things, even seemingly crazy things like AI,” says Dai. “We believe in the value of working together as a school to tackle societal changes, which not all schools do.”

AI IS FOR ALL — BOTH POETS AND QUANTS

Though he is more of a Quant, Dai says he considers himself more of a Poet. He says though many people expect that AI stems from Quants, it actually stems from Poets like Herbert Simon, back in the 1950s.

“Over the years, I’ve noticed some of the best performing student teams are from the Poets’ side – from majors in history, political science, linguistics.” Students from these disciplines ask these really deep questions,” says Dai.

Those from engineering and computer science backgrounds also perform very well, he says, but many from the poet’s side seem to do best.

“That is the beauty of AI, it’s so inclusive, it is really for everyone – not just for computer scientists,” says Dai.  

HOW DO YOU ENVISION THE FUTURE OF AI?

Dai predicts that in a few years, the excitement around AI will dwindle as it settles into our daily lives — normalized, just like happened with the hype around social media.

“It will become more of a part of our lives, it will be deeply embedded into workflows,” he predicts.

Dai also encourages those working in AI to proceed with caution and a sense of responsibility for society: “We need to carefully think through the pathway to make sure the world we are building is desirable and fulfilling.”

DON’T MISS PIONEERING AI USE IN THE BUSINESS ANALYTICS CLASSROOM and INNOVATION: USING FACULTY AVATARS & AI IN AN MBA CLASSROOM