Samford Homecoming Lecture: What in the world is happening in AI?

I gave a lecture today as part of the homecoming activities on the current impact of AI in both our world and in education. Going to write up more about it later, but it went well! Here are the powerpoint slides: And here is a link to the facebook live video: https://www.facebook.com/brian.toone/videos/1534532750722315 If the Facebook… Continue reading Samford Homecoming Lecture: What in the world is happening in AI?

5th generation programming language?

1st generation programming languages – MACHINE LANGUAGE In the beginning there was machine language – 1s and 0s only, sometimes entered by manually connecting cables into the right spot and setting the correct switches the right way (e.g., ENIAC). This is what is meant as a 1st generation programming language. 2nd gen languages – ASSEMBLY… Continue reading 5th generation programming language?

homeGPT, cont’d

Stanford Alpaca takes the LLaMA pre-trained model released by the Meta AI and “fine-tunes” the model to respond better to natural language questions and prompts (exactly what chatGPT does). Note, the screenshot above is from LLaMA, not from Alpaca. This shows you the value that alpaca adds as the output from the example LLaMA is… Continue reading homeGPT, cont’d

Linux in the classroom

The simple goal was to use Microsoft Azure services to setup a traditional SQL Database (SQL Server) running in the Azure cloud. Students had $100 credit towards the services. The problem we ran into is that by using all the default settings, you end up with $380/month system that was going to blow through the… Continue reading Linux in the classroom

Windows subsystem for Linux

Well, haven’t we come a long way? It seems like Microsoft has always kept its eye on Linux – providing limited interoperability through it’s Hyper-V virtual machine system. But Microsoft has taken a few leaps forward with Linux in the past year or two. First, they introduced the Windows subsystem for Linux for the latest… Continue reading Windows subsystem for Linux

Another student project success!

Today we launched a new website for the Samford Campus Recreation department. This launch is the culmination of a year’s collaborative effort with the Campus Recreation department, my Software Engineering students from last Fall, and my continued refinements throughout the academic year and summer. The previous version of the website was developed and edited exclusively… Continue reading Another student project success!