BIP AI – AI fundamentals and prompting

See Blended Intensive Programmes for background and context.

Other presentations I delivered during this BIP for AI in education and research:

• Artificial intelligence in higher education: Opportunities and challenges.
• Artificial intelligence in research: Opportunities and challenges.
• Workshop 2: AI for organisation and communication.

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Workshop title – AI fundamentals and prompting

Download the presentation.

In this workshop (13 May 2024) as part of the BIP for AI in education and research, Antonio Lopes, Hugo Santos, and I introduce the topic of generative AI to the programme participants.

This workshop provided an overview of generative AI models and techniques for effective prompting. We introduced foundation language models like GPT, LLaMA, and Claude, from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Microsoft. And we described the landscape of available chatbots powered by these large language models, including ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini.

Our presentation emphasised the importance of prompting as a key interface for interacting with and directing generative AI systems. And we presented prompt frameworks and libraries as resources for constructing clear, structured inputs to guide AI response generation. We discussed principles of effective prompting, such as providing sufficient context, specifying desired outputs, leveraging examples, and confirming understanding.

An interactive task had participants explore responses across different chatbot platforms using the same prompts. This allowed comparison of the nuances in how each AI system interprets and generates outputs. The workshop provided a practical foundation for understanding generative AI technologies and developing prompting skills to harness their capabilities effectively.