MADINA ELMI: Hi everyone! I’m Madina Elmi with the Minnesota Daily. Welcome back to another episode of In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota. 

In my two semesters of being a student at the U I can count how many clubs or organizations I know on one hand. And that’s out of hundreds of student and staff led organizations. This goes to show we never really know what’s happening on campus all the time. 

One of these organizations here I was unaware of is this AI Makerspace based in Walter Library. Nobody I knew had gone there and when I asked around many knew of the space but just walked right past it on their way to other areas in Walter. 

To unveil its mystery, on today’s episode we’re going to have an inside look into what the AI Makerspace is and their purpose. We’ll hear from the manager, students using the space and a student who works there.

Shady Ali and Daquari Hollins are undergraduate students with Ali studying computer science and Hollins studying philosophy. Both engage with the resources provided by the space to create projects relating to AI that they’re interested in.

DAQUARI HOLLINS: When I first showed up there I had kind of just the beginnings of an idea of something I wanted to do for a project. And they were super open to being a useful resource and, and trying to get something off the ground. 

And months later when I came back to visit the second time around, I had a lot more solidified of an idea. I wanted to go in a different direction, and they were open to that too. And then as soon as I started to kind of lay some groundwork for how I wanted to progress.

We were just kind of off to a great start from the word go, and I, um, it was really frictionless. They were able to kind of get me started with vibe coding for my, my app. And that has led into an entire kind of startup project and the team. So it was really great.

ELMI: I wondered how this space came to be in the first place. Assuming there was a significant amount of dialogue about the large amount of AI presence around the world even on campus. How did they come up with this space and how are they keeping up with these constant changes in AI? 

Joe Finnegan the manager of the AI makerspace plays a role in these conversations and how students use the area, he explains the use of their resources, connections and how they engage with the continuous updates to AI.

JOE FINNEGAN: So the AI makerspace was, as far as I understand, an idea that came out of the, the Dean’s work last year, or possibly earlier, maybe last January, and conversations started about what our peer institutions are doing in AI and what kind of resources they’re making available to their students.

And so I think he drawing on inspiration from what we already have in Anderson Labs, so the fabrication facilities, students can do like 3D printing, they can do like metal cutting and grinding and have, they have a lot of access to a lot of equipment they usually wouldn’t otherwise encounter. So I think part of the vision was to kind of provide a, a sort of a digital version of that for this emerging space of AI.

And so my background is actually in research support in the college. So, I, I previously came from an IT support background, so I actually spent a lot of time purchasing and supporting a lot of the hardware that’s currently being used by our researchers for, for performing AI and for instant training.

This is actually the place where I myself end up learning about all the new tools when they come out. So as soon as I think I’ve got my head wrapped around one tool, I’ll come in and one of our employees, or one of the students who comes into the space will say, “Oh, have you learned about this thing yet?” And I just think, “Oh my gosh, I have to learn about another new tool.” 

But the rate of change is incredible and I consider myself relatively engaged in the AI world. My algorithm is populated with a lot of AI stuff and cutting edge technologies and, and I’m still having a student who will come in and they might mention something they heard about and three weeks later, it’s the most important thing happening in AI at that moment.

ELMI: Beyond just being a good resource for helping to create projects and understand AI, the AI Makerspace also serves as a job opportunity for students like Shady Ali, a fourth year student in the College of Science and Engineering. 

He enjoyed using the resources provided by the AI makerspace in his projects. He feels he’s gained more knowledge working in the space and helping other students understand the tools provided to gain new skills.  

SHADY ALI: I initially found out about it when I was looking for a part-time job on campus when I first arrived here, and I thought to myself like instead of just working any other job, I could do something that is like, it does serve as a job, but also something that I care about and practicing my own like studies and career. So it’s honestly a win-win for me. 

And yeah, I work here about 10 hours a week. And it goes beyond just like learning about, yeah, this new framework, this new approach, but actually having to set it up for like other students and different systems. And also along the resources here, I had to manage different like kinds of GPUs or computers. 

ELMI: At this point I wanted to know more about what projects students can work on here. With little to no knowledge of AI myself, I wasn’t aware of the possibilities the technology has to offer. Students engage with AI in a multitude of ways such as Hollins who received support in creating his start up. 

HOLLINS: They basically vibe coded for me the very first version of the MVP for my startup. So I wanted to build an app out and I had a kind of idea of how it should work, but I knew that it’s not something I could put together and code myself. So I went there seeking help for coding purposes. And I would say that what I went there for is what I got.

Like I, I wanted help with coding and the AI models that they have available were able to just get my first version of my app up and running. And just kind of proving that what I was trying to do was possible. I was, I was glad that like AI played the role that I really had kind of carved out for it. It wasn’t like that it just did everything. 

It was like, I have this idea that I think AI can be used in this specific way, and they were able to like slot that in, in exactly the way that I had imagined it. So for my purposes it’s like interpolating between two databases in a way that like requires like on-the-fly parsing between two different sets of data and would take a lot of time for like a human to either do, or a lot of time to program separately. 

ALI: We could just give you the resources that you need, whether it’s like local resources, cloud resources, no matter how expensive it is, for the most part. And honestly, the biggest selling point that I found over time for the space, which I didn’t really expect at the beginning, is helping people starting businesses or startups. 

Over time we’re starting getting more and more students that just have like products or ideas that they want to achieve, but they don’t really have the skills or things that we typically need, like a team of engineers or computer science engineers. We could just help them out and let them set it up. And we already had like one student that participated in a startup contest and he got the second place over an idea that he started developing here in the space.

FINNEGAN: Students can come here and they can go through our project proposal process and if we approve their project, they can sort of use us as their principal investigator to actually access those resources and, and really play around. 

I alluded to that project environmental impact, it’s a project called “You Conserve” that was done by one of the students that came in here and that project, they basically came in with this idea that with a barcode, you should be able to, through various environmental databases and connected systems out there on the internet that already exist, you should be able to get a pretty good idea of the environmental impact of a single product based on its barcode. 

The interesting piece about that project, and we see this with a lot of the incoming projects, is it’s not a fundamental reinvention of something, but it’s combining different sources of data and different systems that otherwise did not previously interact to create something new.

ELMI: By this point I’m almost intimidated with the work students can create here, students could feel out of place in a space so resourceful filled with students who can make such large projects and successful startups. 

That would be the case if the AI makerspace wasn’t beginner friendly, staff and students welcome peers to join them in simple conversations regarding AI, even if you’re completely against it your voice is welcomed and heard rather than disregarded. 

HOLLINS: I think it’s usually curious people. People who are interested in understanding how AI can play a role in what they’re doing, people who are very creative and have ideas come in and share those ideas and ask about if something’s achievable with AI that they wanna see, like it was for me. And I think it’s usually people who are just very optimistic and have something that they want to strive towards and AI can potentially give them that.

You’ll get a lot of encouragement no matter what you go in with. But it is also always better just to kind of have a clear vision and not to be put off by the, you know, the idea of it being AI because the AI bubble and all this stuff. You know, the, the culture that surrounds AI is not quite so black and white.

I don’t think it’s like this thing that is deserving of huge amounts of fear or like, crazy amounts of praise at the same time. It’s like, you know, it’s just another tool. And this is a place where those tools are accessible to you. So I would, I would encourage anybody who’s curious to go in and ask questions kind of make up their own mind and, and interact with the space.

FINNEGAN: I would invite everyone to come and just check it out. If you want to talk about what AI is useful for, if you want to learn how to make an app, if you want to learn how to build your portfolio, if you just want to get basic education, this is a fantastic place to start. Even if your basic question is what is AI? How do I use it? We are the perfect place to start for that kind of a journey. 

That being said, if you’re also more advanced, we’re also a great place to go for that. We are, we are really interested in engaging with students and staff and faculty at any level of skill and ability and to see what we can do to basically better support the community. 

Honestly, for the first few weeks it was almost all CLA and Carlson students. I saw very few CSE students when we very first opened up. We obviously have now a large regular CSE student population. We have a huge group of students that come out with absolutely no technical background. 

In fact, we have a lot of people who come in sort of with the intention of not engaging with AI, of talking about why AI is not good and not useful in many areas, and we engage with that in, in, with just the same passion that we engage with anything we think it’s good for. So really engaging deeply with perspectives of people who, who have no technical background has been just as important to us as engaging with people who have more of a technical background. 

ELMI: Students on campus are incredibly proactive regarding their career, often joining clubs or organizations with the intention of using the experience to land an internship or job. The AI makerspace has proven to be another resource on campus that people use to bolster their resume. 

FINNEGAN: We’ve seen people come here specifically with the goal of an internship in mind. Some people will come in and they, they don’t know what internship they want and they want some help kind of exploring where they might be able to go with that.

Other people might come in with an actual, a specific internship at a specific company and a position in mind, and they are looking for some help to build their portfolio or to build up their resume and their experience a little bit so that when they go in to apply for that internship, they can say, “I have a little bit of experience in this area, or I’ve used AI to do this before.”

And in addition to that, they also know that, that they also have a support structure here. So they can always come back and ask us questions about AI, even if this means that they go out, they get their internship and maybe they start their work there and they run into an issue they’re not familiar with. And maybe they don’t wanna ask a colleague, well come back, we’ll help you out with those exact same things. So the skills that we teach are very foundational. 

ELMI: At the end of the day the students who use this space often come here just to learn about AI and how to interact with it. It isn’t always about a large project, landing a job, or creating a start up, but sometimes about simpler things like being curious, and the AI makerspace serves as a great place to be just that. 

It’s a place to work together, to recognize that no matter how small or large your goal is there is support within the AI makerspace for anything you’re working on. 

HOLLINS: I wanted to be sure that like I could talk confidently about like the thing that I’m building, even if it was something that like has AI involved. I wanted to be able to understand it and explain it for myself to other people that I’m interacting with. 

And, I have gotten that capability from the AI makerspace. It’s not like they kind of take your idea and manufacture it and then just send you on your way. I was able to like sit down and learn exactly what was going on behind the scenes with the model that my prototype is using and everything involved there.

And that was extremely necessary and useful for me because I knew it wasn’t gonna be like a solo endeavor. I would have a team and I’d need to know how to talk about these things with other people. And they were really patient and had a lot of information. So I guess in my, my day to day, like I can walk around just being like more confident and knowing exactly what it is that is going on.

ALI: One example would be someone in the, the education department or K-12 education department. They had like many presentations in slides that’s accumulated over like the last 15 or 20 years, and they wanted to update them and like make them look more modern, but it’s like 2000 slides. 

We helped them by creating an agent that does that whole process, like, here’s the template or here’s what we have in mind. You just go in and start updating these slides one by one, which would probably take like weeks or months for, for an individual to do by themselves.

ELMI: Regardless of your background and your stance towards AI, the AI makerspace is a community that involves communication and collaboration. The episode really opened my eyes to the possibilities of AI and how the university can support those who want to learn more about it or create projects using it. 

It was interesting to hear about what U of M students have worked on and how the makerspace made them possible. If you have an idea stuck in your head or just want to talk about AI, the makerspace is located on the 1st floor of Walter Library room 125, open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.

That’s all I’ve gathered for this episode, thanks for listening! This episode was written by Madina Elmi and produced by Ceci Heinen. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, send us an email at [email protected].

My name is Madina Elmi and I’ll see you next time on In The Know.