#200: UCSB's Data-Driven AI Pilots + ASU's Multi-LLM Innovation Platform + Google's Higher Ed Partnerships [EDUCAUSE 2024]

[00:00:00] Hey, what's up everybody? This is Joe Toste from techtables.com, and you're listening to The Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human-centric stories from public sectors, CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights and current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events.

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Joe Toste: Welcome to the Public Sector Show by Tech Table. Super excited to have you all on today, and we're gonna kick off with Kyle, quick intro and then we'll go down the line.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Hi, I'm Kyle Bowen, deputy CIO at Arizona State University. Great to be here. Love it. Josh Bright. I'm CIO Associate Vice Chancellor for it at uc, Santa Barbara.

Josh Bright (UCSB): Love it. Charles. I'm Charles Elliot. I'm at

Joe Toste: Google Cloud as a field CTO for public sector. Love it. And those who are watching on the video after this because it will get released. The reason I'm probably going [00:01:00] to lean over to Charles now is so that I can hear him because we're in this loud Kerasoft booth at Educause, which is pretty awesome.

Joe Toste: Thank you all for the brief intros. Kyle, a hot topic right now at the institutional level is developing enterprise AI strategies at ASU. You're leading this effort. Walk us through how you're thinking about this impact driven approach to AI and how it aims at student outcomes.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Absolutely. So that's where, this has been a big part of our focus over the last 18 months, really engaging with our faculty, with our students, with our staff, talking about what the future looks like with AI and designing a strategy around that.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And really that focused on three big areas of work. One is around developing kind of education and community, really engaging those people in our university community around, Kind of leaning into and working with A. I. Also around developing a technology strategy, really planning for the future and preparing for as new technology comes out.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): How can we make this a part of our teaching, learning and research? And then the third part of that, which is really creating the space for experimentation, getting people hands on with tools, enabling them to try new things and develop new best [00:02:00] practices. That's fantastic.

Joe Toste: Can you share 1 to 2 practical examples?

Joe Toste: of how you're using AI at ASU right now?

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Yeah, absolutely. One great example, and it's a story that I love, which is, one of our German professors who has developed a custom TPT that helps their students talk through and learn to speak German. And using generative AI, they can interact with it in novel and creative ways, and they can talk to the AI about whatever they think is fun and interesting, and get feedback on their language.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Another interesting example, an operational one, is how some of our technology teams have been using generative AI to help craft craft messages around incidents and outages that take place on campus. So it allows our technical staff to translate and help communicate about what's happening in some of our technology environments to provide better messaging, faster.

Joe Toste: Love that. I told on our intro call, I was saying a number of years ago I took some courses online at ASU online. This is before online was like a cool thing to do. And the example you just said, I took French, right? And I'm wishing this bot was available back then when I was there. It was not.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): [00:03:00] Yeah most of us learn the foreign language by saying arcane phrases, like, where is the library, or how do I get to the disco, or whatever it is.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): But part's the opportunity now with AI, you can learn the language in whatever is interesting to you.

Joe Toste: Josh, UCSB is currently updating its campus IT strategy with the focus on research, teaching, learning experiences, modernizing work, and improving campus wide productivity and infrastructure.

Joe Toste: How are you ensuring the IT strategy aligns with and supports the institution's broader mission and priorities? Yeah, that's a big important

Josh Bright (UCSB): thing, particularly at UC Santa Barbara, where decisions really have to involve a lot of consensus and making sure that we have our stakeholders. That's a big part of the campus culture.

Josh Bright (UCSB): So we really made an emphasis in our efforts to collaborate and survey the campus very widely. So we interviewed over 200 key stakeholders, all the academic and administrative leadership, over 70 faculty, our key academic senate groups staff affinity groups, our student leadership built a set of built a set of consensus initiatives out of that.

Josh Bright (UCSB): One of the ways we were able to do that, we had some really great partners. So we worked with [00:04:00] Goldstein. They really speak higher ed and IT strategies, so they're not going to sit down with the dean and start talking about profit and loss statements, right? They really were able to get a fantastic engagement with our faculty and with our, with key staff, and then we developed a consensus approach from there,

Joe Toste: yeah, I love it. Charles, you are a last minute addition. I absolutely love this. I would love to hear, how does Google Cloud work with universities like UCSB, like ASU? How do you speak into that strategy? Both on the strategic level and kind of an A. I. Level.

Charles Elliot (Google): Yeah. We first off our research institution of our own.

Charles Elliot (Google): So I would say for years, Google's been a partner at that level. So early days of everything from like classification models in a I to more recently working on disconnected generative models. So things that run in a disconnected environment. We've been working closely with these institutions to explore all those research areas.

Charles Elliot (Google): And I would say more recently with Kind of adoption and everything from admissions to operations, we're seeing more and more use cases leverage not just Google models, but even open [00:05:00] source models in a way that, is very secure, still leverages data. So using institutional data to drive better outcomes for students, for faculty.

Charles Elliot (Google): But still tapping into all those great sort of research initiatives, too. As Google, we love it where I come from a research background myself. Playing a role and building those kind of partnerships out. It's just a lot of fun, and

Joe Toste: it's quarter what we do. That's fantastic.

Joe Toste: Do you have I'm sure you get to see a broad portfolio across Google Cloud. Do you have one to two examples of these are like your favorite use cases that you see across?

Charles Elliot (Google): I think one thing that's unique to what we've been doing since the launch of our big kind of foundation model, Gemini, is seeing a lot of organizations really lean into multimodal sort of interactions.

Charles Elliot (Google): So for us, that means bringing every kind of data you can imagine to a Gemini model. That can be video, audio can be, geometry assignments, you name it. And so I think seeing, customers bring all sorts of data to the model and then, generate all kinds of different output. And I think more recently seeing that in something like Notebook LM is a really great example of, taking [00:06:00] that and building just yet another new experience on engaging with that data.

Charles Elliot (Google): So I think that's like just been overwhelming and awesome. And we really both enjoyed the feedback and learning about new ways people use it. And I'd say beyond that, just search like a lot of our customers are really now that they've got that data, accessible to these systems are building better search experiences for students and for faculty and internally.

Charles Elliot (Google): And two core areas, I would say that we're seeing a lot of work in

Joe Toste: that. That's fantastic. Josh, I just wanted to jump back looking ahead. UCSB's enterprise AI strategy taking place across the academic research operational I. T. Landscapes. I know there's a lot of Upfront infrastructure and work that needs to be done.

Joe Toste: But what's your kind of vision for that?

Josh Bright (UCSB): Yeah, so we've the steps you've been taking so far We've built up a very strong AI community of practice on campus led by our deputy CIO Joe Sabato Working across the faculty with staff with students That's really helping to raise AI literacy on the campus Working with our Academic Senate to try to understand the key concerns making sure we have guidelines and kind of the guardrails in place And then we we see this as a year of [00:07:00] pilots.

Josh Bright (UCSB): So we're actually going to be going through a leadership transition. Our chancellor is stepping down, going back to the faculty at the end of this year. So we're looking at about five or six different pilots that we're going to be collecting data on various use cases for AI, so that we actually have some data to present to our new leadership insofar as they want to make specific investments.

Josh Bright (UCSB): We can tell them what's going to be the most productive for the university and move forward from there.

Joe Toste: I love that. And Joe doesn't know, but he's not here, but you made it on the podcast, Joe, when you watch it, you make, you're here on the podcast at EDUCAUSE. Kyle, you mentioned creating a space for innovation and experimentation with A.

Joe Toste: I. Love that. Josh just mentioned a few of those. What are some helpful tips for C. I. O. S. Or C. X. O. S. Looking to get buy in from their organization to start experimenting with? It could be Jenna and Jen A. I. Or others A. I. In general, across their portfolio.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Absolutely. So I think a big part of that is collaboration across the enterprise, right?

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Working closely with faculty, with students, with academic leaders, with researchers really understanding what the possibilities are and where we can go. I think it's part of that helps inform a bigger strategy around, building that community of [00:08:00] practice, helping people share what they learn along the way.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And then I think another major ingredient of this is having partners who are as ambitious as you are about exploring these kinds of ideas. Because a big part of creating that space to experiment is putting technology in people's hands and really enabling them to do this, develop these practices in real time.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And really define what that future could look like.

Joe Toste: Yeah, wow, that's really great. Josh, I want to jump to leadership and organizational development. There's a quote I love from leadership expert Craig Rochelle. He says, when the leader gets better, everyone gets better. When we met, you emphasized the importance of developing and growing leaders at UCSB.

Joe Toste: This is a big focus for you. What are one to two specific initiatives or approaches that you're using to foster leadership and create that culture of continuous improvement at UCSB?

Josh Bright (UCSB): Yeah, so we've been consolidating it on our campus trying to optimize the structure and services. And so leadership development, particularly in central I.

Josh Bright (UCSB): T. Has been a big focus. So I'm actually putting my entire leadership team, my senior leadership. through a year long leadership development program through more associates. It's the best program that I have [00:09:00] found out there. It's a program I've gone through myself. To develop that shared language and skill up around leadership, it's something we're going to then push through levels of the organization.

Josh Bright (UCSB): We've also implemented a mentorship program on campus. We're now in our second cohort amongst the entire IT community, not just in central IT. Really fantastic outcomes, just helping people to see, partner with those who are a little further along the road, skill up again in leadership and those things.

Josh Bright (UCSB): Also on the continuous improvement side, so we actually have a Lean Six Sigma and continuous improvement based program that we run out of Central IT. That we're actually, we're, this year, we're, it's a part of our performance process. We're having everybody in the entire Central IT unit get at least a yellow belt in Lean Six Sigma and then expanding that out throughout the campus and running events.

Josh Bright (UCSB): Really trying to embed that continuous improvement mindset both around our operations and also around our workforce management. That's

Joe Toste: fantastic. So Charles, Google at large is famous for a number of things, right? It could be OKRs, it could just be true culture, a number of topics. Love to hear just from your perspective.

Joe Toste: What are some of the best customers that you've seen as far as the culture they have at their universities and [00:10:00] across your portfolio?

Charles Elliot (Google): Yeah, like I said, working with really any of the R1s. is great. Just it very much aligns with the sort of go search and explore mentality at Google. We have a an entire part of Google called Google X that we're really considered to be a moonshot factory.

Charles Elliot (Google): And we work with the likes of, Stanford and a lot of the very ambitious things they're doing, but all the way to community colleges, right? So we work with Dallas Community College on reaching new students and, underserved areas. So for us, it's always been core to what we do.

Charles Elliot (Google): We also embrace something at Google called the 20 percent Project. So it's really available for all Googlers, not just the X folks. And I think, seeing institutions like ASU and the UC system really lean into adopting not just generative AI, but this mindset around if you let people explore you can get really, incredible outcomes.

Charles Elliot (Google): And so we, we've just really enjoyed all those kinds of partnerships

Joe Toste: across the board. Kyle, you mentioned creating a space for innovation. And which I think goes really well with supporting the leaders and giving them that autonomy to take ownership. I think it's the heart of it for their [00:11:00] projects and initiatives.

Joe Toste: Talk about a few of those projects that you're excited about that you're enabling those leaders to take?

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Sure. I think, one of the, one of our big parts of our AI strategy is around kind of building technology for the future. And I think part of that is. We're developing something called the Create AI Platform.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And what this does is it brings together a range of different large language models and really enables our campus community. But to do that means working very closely with, faculty, researchers, students to understand the experiences they're having, how they can use that technology to help solve problems themselves, and being very agile about decision making, about where that product can go and how best to support our community.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And really the creation of that, technology really enables us. to create MVPs, prototypes of other new ideas. It really helps facilitate that creative process so that as people raise their hands and say, Hey, I have an idea for a way to improve outcomes with AI, we can quickly prototype something and explore it in more detail.

Joe Toste: That's fantastic. Charles, just real quick, could you just maybe speak to how Google Cloud works on MVPs and getting those initial POVs up?

Charles Elliot (Google): [00:12:00] Yeah I'd say more recently we've deployed a team within the public sector called the Rapid Innovation Team. And so the team is really scaled to help with things like proof of concepts and building from idea to something that you can touch, feel and use.

Charles Elliot (Google): And so a lot of what goes into that is obviously understanding the user story. And we do a lot around working with customers on what they're not just what the user needs are, but what the institutional needs are as well. And then we've used obviously a lot of AI recently to help us generate code faster.

Charles Elliot (Google): But what's been great is, of course, leveraging existing code. So it's a lot of it's I would say more informed as we're building those kind of things. But again, what's been great for us is really collaborating around the user story and just seeing it evolve because all these AI tools have come out.

Charles Elliot (Google): It's just, it's really fun to see and exciting to engage

Joe Toste: with. Yeah, no, most definitely. Kyle, how do you balance the need for cutting edge technology, which ASU is always pushing the edge, I love. Adoption and ensuring that tech like Gen AI directly contributes to the university's mission and the student success.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): I, and I think a big part of that is creating, frameworks or programs that help our [00:13:00] community and kind of engage in that process, right? And that not only engages our faculty students, or I'm sorry, our faculty staff, but our students as part of defining what that future can be as well. So one of the strategies we have applied is something we call the AI Innovation Challenge.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And what it does is a solicitation that looks, it's familiar to our community because it's research based and it's competitive in a fun way. And it solicits ideas from across our community for people who have ideas, things they want to try to generate AI, and we can help support them through that process and learn from that.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): And it simultaneously helps us explore the area to see what may be possible and also to understand what some of the issues might be. It helps us put in place the kind of. Guidelines or processes to help mitigate them in the future.

Joe Toste: That's great so just as a side comment on the cutting edge technology piece Have you done ASU's got this podcast?

Joe Toste: Have you done the ASU in the Waymo podcast? Have you done that?

Kyle Bowen (ASU): No, I've written in a Waymo many times, but I've not done the carpool conversation. Yes. Yeah, I'm well familiar with it. Our team produces those there are a lot of fun to check out and yeah, if you're ever visiting [00:14:00] Phoenix or Tempe and you need a ride from the airport in particular, yeah, order a Waymo.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): It's a lot of fun.

Joe Toste: So I've ridden the Waymo in SF, which is, it's just amazing. Seriously, it is incredible. The tech is unbelievable. Homeless guy actually fell down in the road and the Waymo just stopped. Homeless guy got up slowly, exited stage left. Waymo just, I'm like, wow, this is really impressive.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): I'll invite you to the valley and we'll do your podcast in the back of a Waymo. You're welcome anytime.

Joe Toste: I would love to do that. That would be, that for sure would be a highlight. Yeah, that's true. So Josh, as a CIO, how do you navigate that balance between centralized IT services and the decentralized nature of academic departments?

Joe Toste: Especially when it comes to aligning technology with the research and teaching needs of an institution like

Josh Bright (UCSB): ECSB. Yeah, that's a really important question because even though I said we've been working on consolidation optimization, we're still a highly decentralized institution. I think the key is really about collaboration, about building relationships. And those structures that allow you to find a common vision and common areas of focus. The strategy has been around that. And that's so it's a [00:15:00] campus I T strategy.

Josh Bright (UCSB): It's not a central I T strategy. There are different collaborators across the I T community own different parts of that. And I'm a big fan of activity alignment, that idea that there are things that belong in the center. Those commodity things, those things that benefit from scale, those things that everybody needs the same thing.

Josh Bright (UCSB): But there's some that don't necessarily. There's some things that require close touch or proximity. Faculty and research support is a real common space there. I think we've been working, I'm very fortunate because we have a lot of people really committed to the mission at UCSB, and so they're fantastic collaborators.

Joe Toste: So quick follow up. You texted me that you had your entire I. T. Team on site last week. So I'm curious. What were some of the takeaways, lessons learned and a sneak peek into the strategy? Yeah,

Josh Bright (UCSB): my big thing on that has been that, going to remote and hybrid is not just moving people in place.

Josh Bright (UCSB): It's a form of organizational transformation, and we have to be really intentional about it. I think last week's experience we had everybody on site for the entire week. We ran basically a five day conference. And I think the takeaway was that is right. That's my, my, there was, the feedback was fantastic.

Josh Bright (UCSB): We set some vision. We had speakers, we had team meetings, we had meetings with our customers. People got reconnected with the [00:16:00] campus. We had people who'd never been on campus before or hadn't been back for five years. My favorite comment was one of our staff that came up to me and just burst at him.

Josh Bright (UCSB): He said, we didn't know we needed this, and so really the fact that we haven't changed. We're in the new world of work, but people haven't changed and we have to find that balance. Hybrid and remote is really important for us. It's incredibly expensive to live in Santa Barbara, and so it's a strategic imperative for our institution, but we have to make sure we're doing it well, and it requires, I think, a certain cadence of coming together and being a part, and we're working on finding that.

Joe Toste: I'd love to hear about just aligning the Google Cloud technology roadmap with the institutional missions of the universities.

Charles Elliot (Google): Yeah, I think first and foremost, again, I want to harp on the fact that for us enabling researchers and allowing for the capacity that especially recently we've gotten demand for, we're still doing that while also still serving again more of the administrative and teaching and learning experiences.

Charles Elliot (Google): So one thing more recently that we've done is we brought collab, which is, I'd say, used both in a classroom setting. Certainly developers use it. We brought that into cloud to scale that platform for really every team that wants to use it. And what I love about that for organizations is they get all the [00:17:00] benefits of the collaboratory sort of nature of that product.

Charles Elliot (Google): But also you can tap into the really big Google scale compute that we offer. And then the other thing, of course, that we were constantly doing is building around our data strategy. As organizations, scale to adopt new E. R. P. S. Or learning management systems, whatever it might be. What we're building on the cloud side is, hopefully easier ways to integrate with those systems and discover everything from traditional metrics to more kind of machine learning or predictive models on top of that data.

Charles Elliot (Google): So I think we're doing a lot to help the ecosystem, but also still support those really innovative needs to.

Joe Toste: That's great colleges. Is there anything that Charles has said that it's Is that has spoken to you?

Kyle Bowen (ASU): Yeah, absolutely. So that's where, that having, cloud technology is this enabling capability, right? And part of it is that it can manifest in a lot of different ways. It can support our researchers and their computational needs, but can also afford new ways to evaluate, data or to create new ways for students to interact with learning materials.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): So I think that's part of the big opportunity here is if you, many of the, in the way that you described it, which is aligning those [00:18:00] services, that technology, to the things that are going to support teaching, learning, and research.

Joe Toste: Closing out we'll start with Josh. If you could give one piece of advice to a rising technology leader in higher education, what would it be?

Joe Toste: Yeah. If they're a rising

Josh Bright (UCSB): technology leader, they're probably already heeding this advice. I think it's stay, stay focused on the mission of your institution and on finding success for those customers that you're serving that are focused, that are the people delivering on that mission. That's what's going to lead you in that.

Josh Bright (UCSB): Continue that rise for you. That's fantastic.

Joe Toste: Charles, any advice for a rising technology leader?

Charles Elliot (Google): I'd say embrace the unknown with cautious optimism. There's a lot of new things popping up just about every day. But I think just to the same sort of, narrative there is like If you have a mission, if your organization, your team, has a mission, stay true to that.

Charles Elliot (Google): But certainly, embrace what's happening around the world right now. There's a lot of really interesting and creative things happening.

Joe Toste: One quick follow up. What are some of the best R1s like what you're seeing? What are some of the best leaders doing right now?

Charles Elliot (Google): I think so AI sandboxes, we see it just about every institution. I think that's an awesome thing to deploy for faculty and students, especially [00:19:00] students. We hear a lot at the K through 12 level just around the fact that, large districts are starting to build even the same kind of environments for students to, to use.

Charles Elliot (Google): As universities begin to adopt those students into their undergraduate classes having that kind of platform or technology in place is just gonna, I really, I think, create a better adoption

Joe Toste: use case for them. Yeah, that's fantastic. Kyle, one piece of advice for a rising technology leader, get into a Waymo.

Joe Toste: No,

Josh Bright (UCSB): that's,

Kyle Bowen (ASU): I think it's engaging in the storytelling, right? Which is there are incredible things happening with our creative faculty, with our engaged students and really telling their story. And I think that can help people understand the transformational role that technology plays in our mission is by being able to relay that story to others.

Joe Toste: Charles, really enjoy the conversation today. Who else? Who else would you recommend to come on the podcast? Who do you think should be coming on next? Tell their story.

Charles Elliot (Google): I'd say Astro Teller from Google X. If you want like big, again, moonshot guys in tech.

Charles Elliot (Google): I'd say, there's a lot of folks in the LMS space these days. I'm also, I'd love to hear from too. Sam Altman. Is [00:20:00] that? Sure. Yeah. Sam would be great. I'd love to, I'd love to chat with Sam too. Or Demis, on the DeepMind side we've got a lot of folks on our side, but of course, there's a ton happening in universities Ethan Mollick recently I've read a lot of his stuff, I think he's fantastic so yeah I can probably give you a long list That's great, the camera's rolling over there, it's okay.

Joe Toste: Yeah,

Charles Elliot (Google): I'll send

Joe Toste: it to you in a Google Sheet, yeah. Yeah, love it.

Josh Bright (UCSB): Josh, who would you recommend to come on? Yeah, I know, there's so many people doing fantastic things. I'm thinking about some of my colleagues, so I have, I learn something fantastic every time I talk to Lucy Avatician at UCLA. Just a phenomenal leader for that institution.

Josh Bright (UCSB): James Frazee, who's the new CIO at SDSU there, he's also doing some really innovative stuff around AI, understanding the students and their uses of that. I think another fun one so if you, my predecessor, actually, at UCSB, Matt Hall. I've interviewed him! Oh, have you? Okay,

Joe Toste: Too late.

Joe Toste: Matt, you've already been interviewed. I asked him, Matt, we are in Texas, in San Antonio. He's here in San Marcos, Texas. Are you coming to EDUCAUSE? No, I don't do conferences. I'm like, yeah, [00:21:00] okay. Anyways, shout out, Matt. Kyle,

Kyle Bowen (ASU): any recs? It's hard to recommend in this space because there are so many people doing interesting work.

Kyle Bowen (ASU): One of the things I might recommend is looking for the faculty, the scholars who are thinking critically about the ethics of technology in this space because it is so different by discipline and in terms of how you think about it. And so that's where I would encourage kind of thinking beyond the technology, but in terms of the what is the mindful application of technology and who are the people doing the creative work in that space?

Joe Toste: Thank you both for coming on the public sector show by tech tables.

Joe Toste: I know it's super loud. You were trying to get served food during this. It was crazy, but I really appreciate you coming on. This is the live event experience inside the Carousel booth.

Hey, what's up everybody? This is Joe Toste from techtables.com, and you're listening to The Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human-centric stories from public sectors, CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights and current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events.

We offer you a behind the [00:22:00] mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today, and to make sure you never miss an episode. Head over to Spotify and Apple Podcast. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.