‘A potent combination’

(Illustration by Yann Sadi)

The following excerpt is from a story that originally appeared in the fall 2025 issue of the W&M Alumni Magazine. - Ed.

Artificial intelligence is swiftly reshaping how people worldwide live, learn, work and solve problems. Greater efficiency in business and government, faster service for customers, advancements in medical treatment and accelerated research to solve global challenges are among the most promising developments. But great progress inevitably comes with disruption. The rise of AI is also accompanied by concerns about job losses, data privacy and information warfare.

William & Mary is approaching this time of enormous change as a defining opportunity - one that calls for thoughtful leadership, creative exploration and human-centered innovation. That vision is taking shape through the new School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics in collaboration with partners across campus and with the alumni community. Officially launched in July, W&M's first new school in over 50 years represents the university's next big leap in equipping students, faculty, staff and alumni to lead with fluency and responsibility in a world transformed by emerging technologies.

Here, the dean of the new school and others who are shaping this future share their perspectives.

Promoting fluency

"Part of our mission as a school is to help make sure that anybody on campus - whether they're in our school or arts & sciences or the school of education or the business school - has an opportunity to learn how to master AI tools," says Doug Schmidt '84, M.A. '86, dean of the new School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics (CDSP).

The need for graduates who know how to use AI effectively is becoming increasingly clear through what Schmidt sees as a "digital chasm" developing between those who have technological knowledge and those who don't.

"That is going to cause a huge rift in the workforce of tomorrow because the people who have those advanced skills are going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of times more productive than people who don't," he says. "I think we're going to see a huge upheaval in our society. It's already happening. That's why it's so important for places like William & Mary to think strategically about how we are preparing our students to be competitive."

Because widespread use of AI is so new, he says, "part of our role as a school is to help students become more fluent." Schmidt expects that to change as incoming students start to arrive with more exposure to AI: "They're going to be probably fairly facile with AI, but there will be gaps in other areas that they would have learned through a more traditional education process."

The challenge then becomes how to nurture analytical reasoning, effective communication and other foundational skills.

"William & Mary is well-positioned to do this because we have that wonderful tradition of liberal arts and independent thinking," Schmidt says.

"We're giving people a world-class education in the foundational liberal arts and sciences and humanities, while also giving them the opportunity to work with cutting-edge tools with AI and automation. It's that combination that's our value proposition. As usual, the ampersand makes all the difference."

Schmidt says the school will emphasize internships and research opportunities to prepare students for AI-driven careers and graduate school programs, while incorporating ethical integration of AI in classes and pursuing strategic partnerships with business and industry.

"Business acumen is going to be important," he says. "We're working closely with our partners at the business school to give our CDSP students an opportunity to minor in business."

A business minor combined with technological skills, internship experience and a liberal arts background is a potent combination, he says. "People who have that combination of experience and skills are going to be a lot more competitive. If you really want to future-proof yourself as a college graduate who will hit the ground running and be marketable right out of the chute, it's going to be this liberal arts foundation, which is about communication, reading and writing, coupled with technology."

One of the consequences as AI becomes more pervasive is a reluctance to trust written material because of uncertainty about who wrote it, he says. "Employers increasingly are going to be looking at how people perform, how they present themselves." To maintain competitiveness, Schmidt envisions continued engagement with W&M graduates as they progress in their careers, through specialized courses and webinars.

As part of W&M's commitment to be a career partner for life, Schmidt says, "We should be helping to inform and enrich and empower our alumni by giving them access to AI tools that will make them more effective."

Pulling back the curtain

"AI is like a magic trick happening all around us. It writes, paints, sings, even drives cars. Zillow estimates real estate values using neural networks," says Tingting (Rachel) Chung, who teaches in the MBA and Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) programs at William & Mary's Raymond A. Mason School of Business. "Buzzwords like deep learning and hyperparameters are everywhere, and yet most people feel like they are watching a magic show they do not understand."

Chung, whose courses include machine learning and advanced modeling techniques, was addressing an audience at the Sadler Center during the "TEDx William & Mary 2025: Accelerating Innovation" event in March. It's part of a mission she has taken on to help the community beyond the business school better understand AI.

When she started teaching an AI course at the business school in the spring of 2022, she says, very few students expected artificial intelligence to be a focus of their careers. "When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the world turned 360 degrees," Chung says. "Now everybody talks about AI."

Since then, she has facilitated programs for W&M faculty and staff, and has added a weekend elective course for students. The business school is encouraging faculty to incorporate AI into accounting, finance and marketing and other specialty areas. This past summer, Chung conducted a seminar at William & Mary's Entrepreneurship Hub called "How AI Works" for about two dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and Williamsburg-area residents. She also co-wrote an activity book, "AI the Magic Box" - with Alisa Yang '25, Danielle Seay '25 and Rani Banjarian M.S. '20 - to foster technological literacy among middle school-age students.

Using artificial intelligence is a bit like driving a car, Chung says: "You don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but you need to know enough about how it works to know if it's operating correctly."

In her TEDx talk, she uses illustrations from her book to show how the "Magic Box" receives input, converts words or phrases - known as "tokens" - to numbers, assigns them weights and multiplies data values to predict an outcome. ChatGPT, for example, mimics interactions based on 500 billion tokens it accessed through the internet.

"The guess can be right, but usually Magic Box guesses wrong," she says. "Like a child learning to ride a bike, Magic Box fails, wobbles and tries again by adjusting weights and refining guesses over and over again until he gets closer to the correct answer." At the end of her talk, Chung says, "We have pulled back the curtain and revealed AI as an adorable Magic Box that's really good at guessing, where its real magic is math."

However, the true power of AI lies in how we choose to use it, she says. "The real question is, are we going to let AI remain a magic trick or are we going to learn how AI works and use it to accelerate innovation, cure cancer and bring us world peace? The choice is ours."

Read the full story on the W&M Alumni Magazine website.

Tina Eshleman, University Marketing

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