North Columbus News

Students, faculty, and staff at The Ohio State University now have access to secure versions of Google AI tools. The announcement was made during Data & AI Day, held at Ohio Stadium and co-hosted by the university and Google Public Sector.

The event featured demonstrations of Google's Gemini large language model, the NotebookLM research assistant and note-taking tool, as well as other applications designed to support academic work. According to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, Executive Vice President and Provost at Ohio State, this partnership is part of the university’s AI Fluency initiative that aims to integrate AI education into undergraduate programs starting this year.

“Our mission is to shape the future for our students,” Bellamkonda said. “Every student who’s coming in this year will graduate being bilingual – fluent in AI and the application of AI in their careers.”

Bellamkonda emphasized that faculty and researchers will also benefit from access to advanced technology: “What we’d like to do is to empower you, our faculty, our scholars, our teachers to have access to the tools, to have access to resources, and then you interpret how AI makes the most sense for you,” he said. “How might we create a moment for our students to think about them discovering something that they did not know before? AI Fluency at its core is our journey together at Ohio State.”

Charles Elliott, Chief Technology Officer of Google Public Sector, spoke about adapting higher education workflows with artificial intelligence: “We really try to focus on making sure that AI can be folded into the workstreams that many of you do. And of course, think about productivity,” Elliott told participants. “There’s a lot of great resources … out there specifically for teaching. I encourage all of you to go check those things out.”

Breakout sessions during Data & AI Day gave instructors hands-on experience with using Google’s tools for tasks such as designing courses or lectures and preparing students for exams. Jillian Yoerges from Google for Education noted: “By experimenting with the tools, ‘you will have an idea of what you can do,’” she said. “‘You will also have an idea of what your students can do.’”

Researchers were shown how these tools could be used for accessing various models and datasets across disciplines or summarizing complex research articles into brief audio formats. Chris Daughtery from Google Cloud highlighted: “Understanding what tool to use for what is important.”

For more information on accessing these new resources through Ohio State's system, visit Ohio State’s Sign Up and Provisioning website.