#201: UHCL's NASA Partnership + UT System's Enterprise AI Strategy [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 tables. Super excited to have Lee, Brian and William on the podcast. For those who don't know you, Lee, Brian, introduce yourself, name, title, where you're from and a little bit about yourself.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Lee, Brian Gaskins. I am the senior associate vice president of I.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: T. And so for University of Houston, Clear Lake, my responsibilities are institutional reporting, libraries and I. T.

Joe Toste: Fantastic. [00:01:00] What's something that someone doesn't know about you that you would like to share or a cool fact or something fun?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: I raise chickens. You raise chickens? That's awesome! Yeah, my I get all the eggs that I could possibly want.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Oh, that's like organic at

Joe Toste: its finest. Yes, it

William Huang: is. Oh, I love that. William. Great to be here. I'm William Wong. I'm the Deputy CIO for the University of Texas System. So within our organization, our leadership team supports our 14 campuses, the diverse missions through the strategic initiatives that are important for IT and the campus missions.

William Huang: Fantastic. And what's a fun fact or something about you that you'd like to share? So a long time ago, I used to mix in terms of DJ activities. So I haven't done that. So most people don't know that. Can't do anything on the turntables these days, but that's what I used to do a long time ago.

William Huang: I don't know. Are you sure

Joe Toste: we might get those turntables back out? So we're going to kick off with developing student talent and it innovation. William, you declare when we met you declared 2024 is the year of the [00:02:00] student in the UT system. Walk us through your strategy for leveraging student internships and programs like the Archer center fellows.

William Huang: Yeah, sure. So we're at EDUCAUSE. There's all the talk about AI. I thought it was important to center the conversation around students, right? So for most of us in IT, at least in higher ed, the academic mission is important. So for us, I'll highlight two of our programs, the Archer Center Fellows. That's a program that we've had for about 25 years.

William Huang: It's based in D. C. Most people don't know that UT System has a D. C. office, but we do. Brings together about 30 to 40 undergraduate, graduate, and medical education fellows, so that each of these students can get a semester in DC learning about public service, leadership. The goal of that program is to develop future leaders, whether you're in the private sector or the public sector, by helping to understand the policy aspects of federal government, state government, local.

William Huang: So it's a really good program. Leadership first, right? The second [00:03:00] program that we've been excited about is the UT System Internship. Like the Archer Center Fellows, we have a summer program. It's about 12 weeks in length. It allows all of our students across the UT campuses, including some of our law school partners, to UT System.

William Huang: The work will be in IT, business, accounting, audit, and with our legal area, what's nice about that program is other than, in addition to the functional work the things that I talked about, our students get nine hours a week of professional and personal development. So some of the soft skills needed to go from degree to career.

William Huang: So that's what we're really proud of in terms of the ways we're bringing students real experiences. I love that. And what's that looking like at Clearlake right now?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: So at Clear Lake, we're really trying to focus on our graduate education, and I'm really trying to get our graduate and undergraduate enrollment numbers up, right?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: A lot of community outreach, a lot of, we're in a city that has [00:04:00] several institutions. And public and private, Rice is there, Baylor, these really good schools. We're all competing for the same talent. But we're also doing a lot of collaborative things with other schools. It's we don't all have to have a zero sum game with this is not it can be my student, students can take things at different campuses.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: We all can win when the students win. So I think like the year of the students that are very apropos because we should all be looking forward to doing stuff with the students and giving them the best possible experience, not just at our campuses, but with other

Joe Toste: campuses as well. I love it. That's fantastic.

Joe Toste: William. So let's jump to enterprise A. I and specifically on the strategy front. So you mentioned the importance of Private versus public A. I. In higher education. How is the U. T. System tackling the implementation of enterprise a. I. Across all the campuses?

William Huang: Yeah, sure. So it's a multifaceted approach, right?

William Huang: So like many large university systems or campuses, we're partnering with technology partners to think about what's available. We're legging into it very cautiously. As you can imagine, concerns about ethics [00:05:00] appropriate use in the academic setting as well. Staff use privacy. So on the Yeah.

William Huang: technology side with the public partners. We're being very thoughtful about how we do it. We've got several campuses that are leading in terms of campus specific initiatives that are tied to their mission. UT Health Houston last month announced a very large partnership with OpenAI to be able to provide that for their medical students as well as clinical faculty.

William Huang: On the academic side, UT Austin has talked about this year being the year of AI, so I know they'll have some Exciting things going on. So those two different examples illustrate how we're trying to be very mission centered and student and results focused on how to do it at the detailed level.

William Huang: Going back to the enterprise level on the private AI side, we're running some private AI pilot tests, proof of concepts. We've worked with a couple of our technology partners to roll out a multi node cluster. We're going to host it at our shared data center. And that will be available initially to [00:06:00] UT system, but then all 14 UT institutions will be able to put together business use cases that will then incorporate into future phases.

William Huang: So we're really excited about that.

Joe Toste: So I was a little bit curious because we went to dinner the other night and something that kind of struck me, I wasn't aware of it, that I think in the UT system, 80 percent of it is healthcare. What, are you seeing a couple of different use cases right now on the gen AI side between just the kind of traditional university side and then the healthcare

William Huang: side?

William Huang: Yeah, sure. In a lot of ways, machine learning, AI, and analytics has been around for a long time. And I think the current addition, if you will, of the AI is really fascinating in terms of the large language models. You've heard about. I'd say specifically on the healthcare side, it's been very targeted.

William Huang: So some of the areas that we've seen some really impressive development is in the field of oncology. So several of our health institutions provide clinical care, including oncology. That's an area where we're starting to see some [00:07:00] advances in being able to look at the data. think about the impacts of health care, how we provide it.

William Huang: And then separately, we also have analytics programs where we're thinking about the patient safety, patient quality the outcomes as well as thinking about maybe the claim side, what kind of treatments our own providers or doctors and clinicians providing. Are we always giving the, recommended protocols.

William Huang: Are we doing some different things? So we're looking for the efficacy of some of our programs. So in a lot of ways, it's new ways of thinking about the same data, but it's magnifying the in amplifying the way we can look at the volumes and data. So those are some things that are probably more unique for the health care side relative to traditional academics in terms of enrollment success.

Joe Toste: That's fantastic. Lee Ryan. How is Clear Lake? Clear Lake. I actually, I don't know, cause we didn't have that big of a chance to meet, but what's the lay of the land for the enterprise AI strategy? How are you thinking about that?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: So as a system University of Houston is looking [00:08:00] more at how do we put some policies and some guardrails around it first?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: This, we're going into a legislative session. So there probably will be a lot of things that come out of that session as far as laws. And guidelines from the state. So we're looking, okay, how can we leapfrog ahead of that a little bit and just put some guardrails up? From an enterprise perspective, we're looking at kind of regulation policy, those things.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Now, at the regional campuses, we're looking at student success. And so we're looking at ways to use AI for student success parts. For the student itself so You know, instead of having students use AI to do their homework, we're saying use AI While we develop AI to use for tutoring so have them use a tutor.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: That's an AI tutor That's available 24 7, night before the test. Hey, can you give me some sample questions? That may be on the test that can and in as I answer these questions What are some of the places where I have weaknesses and we help me reinforce those weak spots? Also looking at it from, we have all of this student data that we've [00:09:00] collected over the years.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: What are some of the ways that we can mine and analyze that data with AI and say, Hey, what are some areas that we're not seeing that may be gaps for our students? What are some things, what are some things that we haven't even thought about that could help our students? What are some things that administrators could use just to make the students experience?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: You have something that, have a technology that has, unlimited capacity. Why don't we throw it at, a problem that all of us, I think, in higher education now face, which is the student experience. That's

Joe Toste: fantastic. I, when you said the tutor, I was, I immediately had to jot this down.

Joe Toste: We had Kyle Bowen, who's the deputy CIO. for Arizona State University. And he used the example of for language. I think it was German. A German chatbot to help the student. And I was thinking, I would have loved that when I took French. Oh my goodness. This would have been fantastic. This is a great use case.

Joe Toste: I love that. Yeah, preparing for a test. Asking questions. No. What am I not thinking about? [00:10:00] All those prep questions are really like, talking about the collaboration, which you hit on, I really like that. UT I think it's 14, is it 14? 14 institutions that's quite a bit.

Joe Toste: How do you, William, how do you balance the kind of system wide initiatives of each campus in the areas of healthcare and IT, research? Like, how do you balance all that at a system wide level? Yeah.

William Huang: And that's really challenging, right? It takes a lot of collaboration, interoperability. But in the end, I think it's really finding areas where we scale the system, right?

William Huang: We are very autonomous. All 14 campuses have their own IT leadership teams that are supporting the campus mission. So I think our job at the system is finding the areas where we get a lot of tailwind, right? How do we get a lot of scale? So one example I'd give is in the area of our business productivity tools.

William Huang: We're we use Microsoft, right? That's an area where We've decided to site license that for all 256, 000 students, all of our faculty, staff, and clinicians. By doing that at scale, [00:11:00] it was something that we could bring to our leadership, get the financial support for, and then with some cost sharing, provide the same type of Microsoft tools for every campus across the organization.

William Huang: That's

Joe Toste: fantastic. Lebron at Clear Lake. How do you work with someone William? You've got your own institution. Do you guys play friendly? Do you like to collaborate? What's the inner work?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: We're all collegial, right? But all politics are local, right? We are part of a system, but we're a system of four schools and we do work together as a system to get some of those calls sharing big, large software licensing, those types of things.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: We definitely do that. But, In between our campuses, so I like, I work a lot with my counterpart at the downtown campus. And so we look at ways regionally to share. When I was in the A& M system, the four colleges that were, four universities that were south of I 10, we had a group that we got together independent of the 13 large, 13 campuses that are, 12 campuses that are in the A& M system.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Those four would get together and figure out ways because we [00:12:00] had the same demographic of students. We're a Hispanic serving institutions, we had a lot of native Spanish speakers. And so a lot of the technology issues, problems, and opportunities that we saw were somewhat unique to our campuses.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: So we partner and we do the same in Houston, a lot of our, downtown and us are about relatively same size, a few thousand off. But we have the same types of students. They have a lot more graduate students than we do, so we look at ways, hey, there's ways that we can share some of these licensing that we have.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Some of our, a lot of our professors, especially in Houston, teach at multiple campuses. They'll teach at my campus, then they'll teach at the main campus, then they'll teach at the downtown campus. And so we share resources. So we also try to look at making a similar experience for our students between the campuses, and a similar experience for our faculty amongst the campuses.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: That's great.

Joe Toste: So a quick follow up. So technology is moving real quick right now. We all get that, but I think the infrastructure side can [00:13:00] be lagging. It could be funding. It could be a number. It could be a number of things, especially like just with what AI is consuming. Leave Ryan right now.

Joe Toste: Where do you see where do you see that going in the next five years?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: There will always be a case for infrastructure upgrades.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: The technology changes so fast. If you look back ten years Gigabyte Ethernet was, somewhat unusual. Now it's like commonplace. Wireless is everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's on your mic right now, too. Yeah, exactly. You're right. So you're, we're always going to be on that kind of trying to catch up with that curve.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: But we also look at ways to collaborate to figure some of those things out. And I think I know they do this in the UT system where, there'll be campuses that work on technologies and they say, Hey, this is a good technology. This is a great use case for us. Why don't we start rolling it out across campuses and then another campus will come up with something or Find another technology that's better than that.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: And then so you kind of cycle technology. And so at our local campus we spent especially during the covid covid cycle, we spent a lot [00:14:00] of doing infrastructure upgrades. So our campus still has a little bit of technology dead, but we're still we're coming out of that. But we're looking more at services.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: We're moving away from infrastructure being our bottleneck to looking at how can we use bigger infrastructure. Much more robust services. So using more cloud using moving things away from the campus because the student experience at some point, like we talked about before, it's going to be.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: I don't need to be at a brick and mortar place, but I do need to be able to connect to it. So why don't we look at ways of putting things in places where people can easily get to it, where then it becomes somewhat infrastructure agnostic.

Joe Toste: Yeah, no, that's really good. We on the last episode had. Dr. Joe Way from UCLA on kind of the learning digital spaces and Dr.

Joe Toste: Vanessa Keenan, UTSA. And it was interesting to hear them speak about the brand for that student, also with the university. Curious yeah, without the brick or mortar, like, how, how, how are [00:15:00] you thinking about when you mentor the next generation about the Just the impact that you as a CIO are thinking about.

Joe Toste: Vanessa had a couple of her students here. I'm sure you've got some students back home. Yeah, what is, what does that look like? What kind of that dynamic at

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: For the brand, has a really good brand, especially in Houston, which is great. So we really promote that brand, but it's not as much about the brick and mortar anymore.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: It's about the education. You look at. UT Law School. That's, everybody in Texas knows UT Law School. Has a really good law school. So everybody in in the Houston area knows has a great law school. We have a really strong engineering and education program and business program at Clear Lake.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Especially, we were even developed because of NASA. 50 years ago, the director of NASA went to and said, hey, we need graduate education near NASA. And so we've been partnered with NASA since our inception. And so that's our brand. It's like Clearlake is really there with NASA.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: And [00:16:00] so students wanting to go into aerospace engineering, they look at Clearlake. They want to go into space exploration business. And there's a lot of import export business around space exploration now. They go to Clearlake. We do work a lot about our brand. Oh,

Joe Toste: I love that. Okay. If I was going to prep for this, and it wasn't last minute, I would have loved this story, but I'm glad you brought it up because yeah, love space, love NASA, I I've not actually been to a NASA facility, but I have been to a SpaceX facility and I got to go through, it was just totally epic, but I think the closest, I'm trying to think, the closest I've gotten, I was recently at the Ronald Reagan Library, which is in Simi Valley, California, and there is a huge section for going to the moon and kind of Reagan's vision for this.

Joe Toste: And and so it's a bit more of the history of it. And so they documented that. It was like super cool to see like back then focusing like, Hey, like we cannot go to the moon and you're like, Hey, we're going to try and make this happen. So I love the dynamic of that. And I'm going to add that into the show [00:17:00] notes.

Joe Toste: I'm sure there'll be some fun. Clear Lake links. If you ever in

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Houston we have the through the space act, we have the, some of the archives from NASA. So if you'd like to come out and see them, you'll see the history of space like free, but also you'll see how we partner with NASA as part of that.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: So it's a very interesting as a kid, always wanted to go to NASA. So I actually got to go and see a lot of, we even have the meal plans for some of the Gemini flights. It's this amazing stuff.

Joe Toste: I love that. Because this won't be released until after my Houston light podcast tour. I got no problem saying this.

Joe Toste: I'm coming to Houston in two weeks,

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: right?

William Huang: Yeah.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: So we'll bring you around. We'll show y'all, we'll show, we'll give you a tour of our libraries and you'll get to see a lot of stuff from space. Oh, and I

Joe Toste: haven't booked my flight yet. So this is fantastic. I'm going to bake this thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Toste: I love it. It's fantastic. Moving on to just fostering that innovation and digital transformation. William UTSA has been making waves with its School of Data Science. How is the UT system leveraging this and other campuses to drive that digital transformation [00:18:00] across all campuses?

William Huang: Yeah, that's a great question. Love being in San Antonio. We're here at EDUCAUSE. So let me give a shout out to UT San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio. We're just merged, right? We're working on it. Not quite done, but yeah, it'll take a minute. But the board has asked us to think about how we can align both of those campuses to really power into the next decade in terms of a really large academic and health campus.

William Huang: So we're really excited about that, but on the student side, on the mission side both campuses announced a joint program recently. So we talked a little bit about AI. So my recall is it's one of the first programs to combine a medical degree from San Antonio with a master's in AI. And so you'll get a traditional three year medical education, a year to focus on AI, and all of that, what that brings.

William Huang: And then the last year, as I recall, is a capstone year to blend it all to help build and help train our [00:19:00] doctors to be better clinicians and also think about the important aspects of AI in terms of health care. So that's something that's really exciting. And it's one of the pioneer pioneering activities.

William Huang: So really excited about that. And one had time to get into it, but I know there's a lot of other good work going across the system, but I thought that one would be. One to really highlight since we're here in San Antonio to be able to give them a nice plug for that program.

Joe Toste: That's awesome Lee Brian interested on I think just broadly how you think about digital transformation.

Joe Toste: I know that can be quite a buzzword But we'd love to hear specifically, what does that actually mean to you and Clear Lake

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Really, it's really about making the experience of the university better, right? How can we use our digital assets just to make the whole experience of being a student, being a staff, being a researcher, whatever, make those things better, make those things flow faster.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: And there is an effort throughout our system to do more digital [00:20:00] transformation. And it's a challenge. I think AI is going to be It's going to be the watershed piece forward because AI is going to give us insights into doing digital transformation that we never had before. We really had to rack our brains and say, okay, what can we digitally transform?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: What can we make better? What can we innovate? Where can we do things now? We can use AI as this underlying platform that helps workers be more efficient and also improve their skill sets. I think, digital transformation I wanted to say this now, maybe put it out there first.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: AI is going to change digital transformation, just like digital transformation changed the institutions. It's going to be, I think it's going to be night and day.

Joe Toste: It's like classic software is eating the world and then now it's AI is eating software. And yeah, no, I love that. So as we're closing out.

Joe Toste: Cause that, you got a lunch date, right?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Oh yeah, she's as one of my former directors, when I worked in the A& M system she was in charge of all our instructional technologies. She's great, so Dr. Pat Abergo. I think she's running off to the restroom, so I have some time. Oh, okay, I think [00:21:00] I saw an eye.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: I was like, okay, I

Joe Toste: got you. William, if you could just give us one piece of advice to a rising technology leader. In higher ed, what would it be?

William Huang: I think LeBron mentioned earlier in terms of the student outcome, student success, and my feedback to new leaders would be in terms of the change, change in IT.

William Huang: Recently Harvard Business Review talked about the half life of IT knowledge being about two and a half years. So my message to leaders would be, listen to your customers, your students, right? Pay attention to what's happening because In some cases, what we used to do a decade ago, or two decades ago, may not be appropriate.

William Huang: My message would be open be closely connected with the student success, the student mission and just be open for change and don't assume there's only singular solutions. There may be new ways of doing things that we haven't even imagined. That'd be my

Joe Toste: advice. Awesome. Lee Ryan, piece of advice you'd give to a rising technology leader?

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Collaborate. You have to get out there. A lot of times as technology leaders all the way through all the way through the organization, we're doing our [00:22:00] thing and we're not really we're up and down, but we're not going side to side, we're not collaborating with our other peers in the institution to know what's going on with student success, with finance.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Student affairs. We're not doing that, but a larger thing we're not doing is we're not collaborating with our colleagues at the campus. Like I call up, collaborate with Will. We run into people. We run into conferences together. We need to do more of that because we get out on these islands.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: And the water rises and we're really by ourselves and we really need to lower that so we can see across and say, Hey, what are you doing? I have this problem. Hey, what are you doing? Oh, I have a technology partner that worked really well with that and really could help me. They could probably help you while we have a conversation.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: We need to build more of those types of relationships. And it's really hard because a lot of times as technology leaders, we're like I said, we're busy doing our thing or we're somewhat introverted and we don't reach across the aisle to ask for help. Yeah, that's

Joe Toste: really good. I think And I meet with so many different leaders across the nation, and that's the one thing, is, them I [00:23:00] say they're, the leader is so head down, and maybe it's rightfully there's just so much going on, there's just fires, But to be really that effective leader, you kinda have to get a, you gotta rise above the fires, and, just nationwide, it's a lot of the problems, People are already actively solving in different markets, which is the craziest thing. And whether it's Miami, or Seattle, or San Antonio, or Austin, or Phoenix, or Denver. And just having everyone collaborate together, because then it just speeds up the actual process of Oh, you've already tackled this?

Joe Toste: You're looking at accessibility. I haven't even thought about that. And it's wow. Okay. That's incredible. And it just brings those different perspectives. I love that. So I love this conversation today. This is a ton of fun. Love hanging out with the two of you. If I'm going to continue this conversation, I'm already, I think I'm past recorded 200 podcast episodes, which is crazy, but.

Joe Toste: Who's the next leader? Who's the next leader that you would recommend? William, who would you recommend to come on the podcast? I'm maxed out at Educause. I have no [00:24:00] more Educause. But after that, who should I reach out to? Who should I connect with?

William Huang: Yeah, I'd encourage you to connect with one of our health campus CIOs to hear the details of what the, what we're doing on the healthcare side.

William Huang: Happy to connect a couple of names after. Love it. Love it. I would I would

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: As I would think to reach out to some of the state CIOs and reason being, especially on the topic of AI and what their legislatures are going to do, because I'm seeing this sort of it's the T 1000 type of mentality that they're thinking of Skynet.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: And so I want to see how they're interacting with their legislatures, talking about these, talking about AI as a technology and kind of alleviating some of those fears, but making sure they're putting laws. and policy in place that actually fosters innovation rather than stifling that. So I would really like to see what these CIOs, especially when the ones that really work with the legislators heavily, what is their kind of their game plan roadmap for how they're going to interact with legislature and what kind of things they need in law and statute to [00:25:00] make the next big thing happen.

Joe Toste: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Absolutely love that. We've interviewed a number of state CIOs. Up to the next time we have a few on we'll be diving into that. And that is actually super important about not stifling the innovation. And a lot of times the legislative body, sometimes they get.

Joe Toste: News, whatever the news cycle is happy versus Hey, you know what? Actually, the world's not going to end that dog robot I saw earlier. Isn't going to take over. If this is not I robot, Will Smith is not happening. Yeah thank you both for coming on the show today. for

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: having us. I've really, it's been great.

Dr. LeeBrian Gaskins: Thank you. Pleasure. No. Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate you. Yeah. I appreciate you. Appreciate

it.

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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