At #JupyterCon, I saw the future of AI collaboration for data science and beyond—and it's not in a chat window. Abigayle Mercer and Zach Sailer demoed an experimental new version of Jupyter AI and it changes the plot for multi-agent systems. A thread with my thoughts… 🧵

𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁 𝗿𝘂𝗻𝘀 𝗰𝗶𝗿𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗝𝘂𝗽𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗿 Friends, I watched an AI agent complete my students' coding exercises in real-time, and I'm shook 🤯 I tested Perplexity's Comet browser on a Jupyter notebook with eigenvalue problems I assigned to my class… (video at the bottom of this thread)

I just rejected a paper because it was pointless in the age of AI. For the first time, I recommended a manuscript be rejected because its content was so easily replicable by an AI model with deep research capabilities. #AcademicPublishing #AIinResearch

🧵 Fall 2025 faculty: I wrote 7 pages on what you need to know about AI before classes start in a week or two—it's posted as PDF in the ‪@figshare.com‬ service under CC-BY: link below… Here are the highlights: 1/8

Good benchmarks allow a user to choose the best method for a particular application. “But the first question is, what do we mean by ‘better’?” Fascinating story by @drmichaelbrooks.bsky.social on benchmarking in #AI. Thx @labarba.bsky.social for the suggestion! 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Had a hallway conversation at #SciPy2025 about #GenAI in coding education → one week later, a (partial) solution is shipped in @googlecolab.bsky.social 🤯 The magic of conference serendipity never gets old. Longer post with story on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Presentation slides for my talk yesterday at #SciPy2025 Barba, Lorena A. (2025). Embracing GenAI in Engineering Education: Lessons from the Trenches. figshare. Presentation. doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...

I did a hands-on tutorial for easily creating a static website using #Jekyll and #GitHub Pages. No local installations—everything is done directly on @github.com! Follow along to: – Fork a Jekyll theme – Deploy with GitHub Actions – Edit the content – Solve issues with #GitHubCopilot (link in reply)

I just released a preprint reporting on my experiment with generative AI in my Engineering Computations course. TL;DR: It was a mess. The biggest issue? The "illusion of competence." #GenAI #education #edtech

Starting now! So excited for our inaugural #GWOSCON Dean Geneva Henry welcoming everyone with optimism about the role of #OpenSource in our university. Inspiring!

There's still time to book your free ticket for GW OSCON from March 24-25 next week. Register: go.gwu.edu/oscon #opensource #academicOSS #openscience #openresearch

March 2, 1867. CHAP. CLVIII. — An Act to establish a Department of Education. "…for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and Territories."

I'm at the "Uncertainty Quantification and Trustworthy AI Algorithms for Complex Systems and Social Good" workshop" at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation, IMSI, in Chicago. Should be fun! (Funded by NSF.) #UQ #AI #TrustworthyAI www.imsi.institute/activities/u...

📣New paper alert: "Verification and Validation for Trustworthy Scientific Machine Learning" We propose 16 recommendations to establish trust in #SciML models through rigorous V&V practices adapted from computational science: arxiv.org/abs/2502.15496 #MachineLearning #ComputationalScience

I'm finally getting around to editing videos from online teaching during pandemic times (to remove dead times and student names and likeness), and uploading them to YouTube. This is for my "Engineering Computations" undergraduate course: #Python functions #EngineersCode #Jupyter

The George Washington University, where I work, has joined a lawsuit as a co-plaintiff in challenge of the federal action to slash payment of facilities and administration (a.k.a. "indirect") costs for NIH research grants. www.aau.edu/newsroom/pre...

The deadline to submit a regular or lightning talk for the inaugural GW OScon has been extended until Monday. Are you in the Washington DC area and love #OpenSource software? Apply to give a talk and join us in March! We have great keynote speakers lined up, too. Check out: go.gwu.edu/oscon

DeepSeek is the perfect illustration for why you don’t want vendor lock-in. The university CTOs that signed a contract for ChatGPT Edu at $1.4million must feel sorry right now.

Our systems of peer review & publishing are crumbling. Predatory publishers, exorbitant costs, unchecked bias, and AI are eroding trust. It’s now more important than ever for scientists to be able to affordably and easily share their findings. 2/

Word of the Day is ‘uhtcearu’ [ucht-kay-aru, with the 'ch' as in the Scottish ‘loch']: Old English for ‘the sorrow before dawn', when you lie awake in the darkness and worries crowd your mind.

We absolutely need to deliberately teach students how to use a variety of AI tools, and so-called "AI skills" are real and more difficult than they appear. The temptation to overuse AI to skirt the hard work of authentic learning is strong! Unsupported, students' use of AI is harming them right now.

I'm having way too much fun with AI-generated podcasts of my class materials 😂 — I hope students will enjoy them too! youtu.be/dI8JBHB0kv0

"OpenAI is aggressively going after the education market, which it sees as a key area of growth." techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/o... University CTOs beware: we need to avoid vendor lock-in! OpenAI GPT-4o may be the most-used model today, but things are moving fast in this sector.

I tried alphaXiv, from arXiv Labs: the platform for open discussion of #arXiv papers. But instead of commenting on one the latest research preprints, I added an author's comment on one of the first papers coming out of my group, 15 years ago! www.alphaxiv.org/abs/0809.181...

Like many professors, I sometimes get bizarre requests from members of the public with an, ahem, scientific interest. This one ranks high on the bizarro scale!

Here's a thought—what if we just, you know, stopped using number of publications as a measure of researcher quality? What if we decided that "publish or perish" was a bad idea from the start? Just at thought. Anyway, fascinating thread here!

As an educator, I'm waking up at night in angst. It is _our challenge_ to find ways to convey responsible use of #AI to our students, lest they go out in the world thinking they can one-shot-prompt their way through any task and end up causing some debacle and getting fired. #generativeAI

My department is still receiving applications for this tenure-track opening: "intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, including but not limited to theory and applications in machine learning, perception, planning, manipulation, and autonomous systems…" www.gwu.jobs/postings/115...

Just keep opening up the box. Much easier to build open source AI now than to try and dismantle mega companies with antitrust later

“The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.”—Madame Cliquot, the first modern businesswoman

For no particular reason, I'm reading about the Marquis de Lafayette, who wrote “The welfare of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become the respectable and safe asylum of virtue, integrity, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful liberty.”

Two of the finest fighters about to step on the ring, streaming on Netflix, and it would appear no one in my BlueSky timeline is aware?

I'm in Harvard township now, attending the OpenForum Academy Symposium for the next two days—"the only academic conference covering questions relating to the social, political and economic impact of Open Source." symposium.openforumeurope.org

Mood: the opposite of joy.

📣 New on Figshare: — Barba, Lorena A. (2024). Generative AI for teaching and learning pilot project 2024-5—White paper. figshare. Preprint. doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...

📢Friday, Oct. 25, 12– 1pm EST—today!—tune in to the live stream: "Open Source Software as Infrastructure for Diamond Open Access" featuring @arfon.bsky.social @karthik.io, Rowan Cockett and yours truly, hosted by the GW OSPO Zoom link to join: gwu-edu.zoom.us/j/9609436569...

On Friday, I presented to the GW Engineering faculty my work on a course-level #AI mentor. By a recent survey, 86% of students already use AI in studies—mostly ChatGPT, and not very well. A course AI-mentor addresses this in a way that is both student-centered and faculty-led…

📣 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗪 𝗢𝗦𝗣𝗢 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗴! "𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗿𝘀: 𝗔𝗻 𝗢𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲" –Green: the DIY solution, –Bronze: a half-measure, –Gold: a gilded cage, –Diamond: researchers' best friend… ospo.gwu.edu/open-access-...

📢 #OpenScience Alert! Re. 🇺🇸US policies affecting federally funded research. My new post for the GW OSPO blog explains the key policy documents—the Holdren and Nelson memos—and briefly describes the NSF's implementation of the policies. ospo.gwu.edu/overview-us-... #OpenAccess #FOSS #SciencePolicy

This week I gave a keynote at PyCon Colombia 2024 in Medellin, where I shared my work on using Jupyter AI in engineering education: in my demo, I generated course learning objectives for 100+ engineering courses in minutes. This process would typically take hours of manual work!

#Barbagroup Publication News! I am in illustrious company on this new issue of the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR) with a piece titled "The Path to Frictionless #Reproducibility Is Still Under Construction" #OpenScience hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/volume6issue1

The GW Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is co-hosting a Summer School in Research Software Engineering with the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), 24–26 June 2024 in Washington, DC. Free registration. Apply for travel support by 31 March: urssi.us/blog/2024/02...

Personal news: I have retired as editor-in-chief of the IEEE technical magazine Computing in Science & Engineering, after 4 years of (grueling) service. It is a huge weight lifted from my shoulders… I hope to write about my experience, because I learned a lot—and I don't ever want to do this again!

I just shared these presentation slides on Figshare: — Barba, Lorena A. (2023). Generative AI for Faculty: an overview session prepared for engineering faculty. figshare. Presentation. doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...

I wrote a demo using JupyterAI to auto-generate course learning objectives for all 108 engineering courses listed in the university bulletin for my department, based on their short descriptions… Find the full demo via this short URL to nbviewer: http//go.gwu.edu/...

AI playgrounds and chat apps are great, but have you heard about Jupyter AI? I wrote a little lesson on using #JupyterAI for my students and colleagues, and my peeps everywhere. go.gwu.edu/engcomp7less... #Jupyter #OpenAI #EngineersCode

I joined here about 10 days ago, and have only lurked a bit. It sure is a blow to stare at an empty timeline. I've found a few peeps to follow, but it feels daunting to start building a network from scratch. <sigh> If anyone sees this, and you know me from the other site, say hi and I'll follow!