Hi, I'm Joe Harroz, President of the University of Oklahoma. I want to welcome you to our conversations with the president. This platform gives me the chance to talk to some of the great people who make OU so special. Make sure you subscribe to conversations with the president, and you'll be the first to know when new episodes are released. Let's get started.
Thanks for joining us today. We have a great conversation ahead of us. But before we get there, we're starting off with what you know as hey Harroz. We have questions that have come in, some great questions. We have two today that I want to cover. The first, Question 1 comes from an OU staff member, Tracy, and Tracy asks, I've been hearing more about the OU Campus master plan. Can you please explain what it is and why now is the right time for the university to take this on? Great question. Thank you, Tracy. The campus master plan, we have not done one of these at least in 20 or 30 years. Let's start with the timing. The timing's right because we're growing at a pace we have not seen in at least 50 years and with that growth comes a lot of construction. We're going to have soon over $1 billion in construction in Norman, several hundred million on the health campus, and so it's growing in huge ways. Think of a campus master plan as the perfect complement to a strategic plan and a strategic budget, except for the built environment. I've heard that from the consultants, they call it the built environment. All of the buildings, where they would go, how they function, and how they promote the academic experience and social experience for our students. That plan is being done. These consultants are amazing. They've just finished up with a number of remarkable schools that are also public flagships, and we've seen their work from Tennessee to Ohio State and other areas, and we can't wait to see what they're doing. It will help us for truly not just planning the next several years out but for decades. Thank you for that question. The second and final question is from Amanda, an OU alumni, and I love this question. She asks, I recently watched the new OU commercial with the orchestra version of Boomer Sooner. As an alum, hearing it reimagine like that was powerful, what was it like for you for the first time? You heard it both as an alum and as the OU president, goose bumps. When I heard it, I had asked if we could do something that maybe wasn't a traditional commercial that you see or ad that you see for universities. They came back with this from our marketing communications department. Blew me away. I think especially as an alum, because it was reimagined. It was this more sophisticated version of Boomer Sooner, but it still struck at the heart of the song itself and all that communicates to me. Absolutely loved it both as president and as an alum. When this was brought in, I watched it I think seven times in a row. Heard it the first time, couldn't believe it, kept listening to it, and I love it. I'm glad that you do too Amanda. Thank you. Any questions for Hey Harroz? Go to link.ou.edu/HeyHarroz to keep the great questions coming in. Thank you so much. Now for your listening and viewing pleasure, this is the new OU spot.
What one can do is beautiful.
What one can do together is unstoppable.
Together, one changes lives. Together, one rises above. Together, one writes their own path.
[MUSIC]
Come see what one can do.
Today, I'm excited to be joined by the University of Oklahoma's inaugural Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, Dr. Shishir Shah. It's a role that has not existed before, obviously. It could not be more important. He is not just in that role, but he is also our Director of the School of Computer Science. He joined us after two decades at the University of Houston, Director of their School of Computer Science, led groundbreaking AI work and computer vision in machine learning and AI innovations has more than 200 publications, national recognition for his teaching and his research, truly accomplished individual that we believe is the perfect fit at the perfect time. He joined us in September of '25, about to complete his first year and is already a critical member of this community. Doctor Shah, thank you for joining us. Tell us how it's going so far.
It's been growing great, first and foremost. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here and it's truly an honor to be part of the OU community. As you mentioned, I joined in September and it's been a tremendously warm welcome. I'm delighted to be here, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to meet some amazing faculty members, students, and staff already in the last few months, and I continue to just be amazed by that interaction and experience that I'm having here.
Yeah. I've been surprised by how much I like you personally. I heard how amazing you were and then I learned that you had not just your bachelor's degree but your master's and your PhD from the University of Texas and yet we still get along really well.
Absolutely. I certainly spent quite a few years at UT. For me, an academic institution and the environment that offers that experience for students, that experience that I was fortunate we were part of, I think, flagship universities, public institutions like OU, UT, they're designed to offer that experience to students. I think those experiences set a career pathway a trajectory for them that is just unbelievable. I think it opens up the world. To me, I think that's just a phenomenal journey to be in and just be part of any of those campuses, I think that delightful.
I'm fully addicted to it, as well. This purpose of changing lives and being a part of it, where the American dream is available, excellence, affordability, connection, all of it, I just honestly can't get enough of it, I love seeing. It became evident during our recruitment of you that you have that energy and that spirit and that sentiment and you have not just this amazing research record, but you've won teaching awards and you're incredible behind the computer in your laboratory of the computer, especially, and also in the classroom with students.
Thank you so much. No, it's just been my passion and that's, I don't know, I've always enjoyed being in that environment. I think, for me, the journey has always been the ability and being in a place where I can learn something new every day.
Yeah, and to me, the greatest scholars are the ones that do all three well. People often talk about, are you primarily a researcher, are you primarily an instructor in the classroom? What I found is in of course, service to society and service to the profession and you encapsulate all of those, and you also are very much on the applied side. How do you take artificial intelligence and apply it when AI is new for a lot of us, but you have spent more than 20 years in this space? You're way ahead of the curve. Tell us when it first captured your imagination and how you've seen how AI has evolved in bulk and where you see it going.
In all honesty, I never really got into the field thinking about AI, per se. I was just in general, fascinated with the abilities that I think humans possess. The fact that we learn things every day, we absorb information around us. We're able to make split decisions any given time, even simple things. We just see the world, we perceive the world, and within that space of information, we are able to make decisions and execute tasks that if I sit back and reflect on them, I'm just amazed as to how well we are able to do it. To me, that was always fascinating. I really started my educational journey this idea that somehow I wanted to build robots and work with robots. As a result, I just thought that might be a good idea to get the fundamentals. I started my educational journey in mechanical engineering, that's what I did my undergraduate in. At that time, of course, I was interested in trying to build robots and I thought that would be the core discipline I would build my foundations in. I certainly got to experience that by working with faculty members who were trying to build robots, manipulators, actually, at the time, robotic arm manipulators. As I got into experiencing how to do that, I realized that one of the abilities that humans possess is to certainly manipulate their arms and legs, but they do it with something else. They actually sense the world and react to it. I started thinking in terms of, why aren't we actually building mechanism so the robotic manipulators could also perceive and sense something? It's just at the time that I was doing this, there was a prolific ability to make cost effective sensors, specifically cameras that became available in the marketplace. I started working with those and learning a little bit about what they would sense, how do you take that signal, digitize it so you could actually do something with that on a computer on ability to tease out what I considered as perceptive information to solve the task of manipulating robots. Of course, at that time, I started getting more and more into computer vision, the ability to take visual information, tease out understandable knowledge.
Computer vision is just that the idea that you have sensors that perceive things and then have the ability to react based on what is seen.
Exactly. We are using those sensors as a mechanism to collect information. We are trying to figure out how we process that information to distill it to information that can help us make decisions. Then, of course, we are executing on that and taking the action to make that decision. That will potentially result in a feedback loop, a continuous loop where now you do something and you have to sense again, and the process repeats. That's what got me interested in it. At that time, when I started looking at these visual sensors, my attention or my interest changed to thinking of how humans perceive the world. We function in this world, of course, in our three dimensional geometry, and we were able to navigate around obstacles and we know what a chair is or how do we recognize these objects. All of these things started becoming quite interesting to me, and I started doing more and more work in this area. Even when I was doing all of this, I didn't quite necessarily think of it as AI. But all of these elements really encompass what artificial intelligence is, the ability to create an artificial system that can explain how systems learn, how systems will reason about the information and how systems will leverage the information to make decisions. In a way, that's really what I would think of as intelligence. If you can do this through an artificial system and machine, if you will, then that becomes artificial intelligence. Now, of course, this idea and the fundamentals of pursuing and understanding the science, we've been doing this for a very long time. Today, we use artificial intelligence, and because there is a prolific access to systems that have been built with this fundamental knowledge, we are now looking at almost the new interface to the Internet. Where for years, when we first started with Internet, we started creating mechanisms to ask information and we had a collection of information and had really interesting algorithms, mechanisms to tease out and find the right information and deliver that. Now we are also using mechanisms where we are learning from that collection of information. We are learning an ability to reason and generate information that may not necessarily reside in that original collection and that ability to generate is certainly part of that artificial intelligence world that we live in, and that ability has now become accessible to everybody, just like Internet was. I think a lot of times we think of that as artificial intelligence. Certainly, it's part of that. But artificial intelligence encompasses so much more. The core of it is really driving those core questions which still remain fascinating. How do we learn? How do we reason about information? How do we leverage that to make decisions?
Yeah, and this crucial moment in time when it's blossomed, and now everyone is incredibly aware of it. We've talked about the impact public research university can have. You're the inaugural chief AI officer. You have the ability to look into the future and to help shape the future. In this role, you've just started it, it's your first year. I hope it goes on for decades like you have at Houston.
What would success look like to you in five or six years under the OU Strategic Plan and your role as chief AI officer? What does that success look like to you?
Right. To me, when I think of AI, I look at multiple facets of what AI is. AI can be viewed as a tool. Today, there are enough AI-enabled tools and systems, and they will keep increasing in the coming years, that are designed to help us get to information faster, designed to collate information, and summarize information a lot faster than humans possibly can. Of course, this is in the context of the vastness of information that's out there. For decades, we've seen that ever since the Internet came about, the ability to assimilate information has just kept exponentially growing. Now, of course, it's reasonable to understand that as information grows, we can, as humans, absorb that information. We can learn from it, but it takes more time. Of course, we live in a space, a continuum where there's only so much time we provide within a certain, let's say, context, right? Educational programs, for example, I mean, yes, it would be amazing that what educational programs took four years to train someone, if we now needed eight years to do the same thing because the amount of information has grown. Well, we don't necessarily have eight years. The idea is that, of course, continuous learning will always happen. We instill the fundamentals, and the learning will continue over whatever span one may want to invest in it. From an AI perspective, I think these tools have accelerated that, and I will think of making that more accessible, right? How do we democratize access to it? At the end of the day, we also have to realize that these tools are exactly what they are. We do need to learn how to use them properly. I sometimes draw the analogy of AI tools as a new toy. It's a new toy, it's relatively new, it's very fancy, it's able to do things that we don't fully understand how it's doing it for the average person, it's delivering information, and it's able to answer things that we thought would require a lot of time and knowledge to do. As a result, we are all very enthusiastic to start working with it. But oftentimes with a new toy, I don't want to read the manual on how exactly to use it correctly. I think that's what we are seeing. A big part of what we need to think about is awareness and literacy around the appropriate usage of AI tools.
This is for faculty, staff, students, and everyone. Right. In your role, you think you can help catalyze making sure we all read the owner's manual for this fancy new toy.
Absolutely. I still think of an AI tool as an enabler, the fundamentals of critical thinking. The ability to take information and formulate what the problems are. What are the challenges? What are the questions we expect to answer? Building that core knowledge, which allows us to then be experts at verifying what we should be getting as an answer, right? To me, I always think of what knowledge is for. We build knowledge so that when we are faced with problems, and we think of how to solve the problems, we not only think of how to solve those problems, but we also have an understanding of the solutions that we can expect to get to. Unfortunately, if we don't have that fundamental, we will accept any solution that is presented to us. I think AI has the ability to present a solution, but it's us who will have to understand whether that solution is within these bounds of what we should expect. That requires that literacy element, that awareness and understanding. I think those are the principles we still need to instill as we embrace these AI tools and technologies that are consuming our space.
Let's be a little more specific.
To me, it feels like there's an opportunity to supercharge the impact under our strategic plan because of the use of AI in a way that is ahead of those that are our competitors. That seems like a clear goal and something that you're well-versed in. Let's talk about students. I think I heard part of the answer in your last answer to this question. What does it mean for us? What will it mean for us in three or four years to prepare a graduate who is AI-ready?
For me, when I think of our students, I think, one, I suspect a large number of students coming to us now probably have experience using some AI tool even before they come to us.
Sometimes when they shouldn't have.
Absolutely. At least the majority of them may not have experience with what an appropriate introduction to the tools is, understanding, or some explanation around how best to use that tool, and use it as a complement and not as a solution generator. We will have to think of how we provide that core understanding, build the fundamentals of what AI is, and how we use it properly.
Every student should graduate with that.
Every student. But more importantly, through their educational journey, they should have multiple opportunities to use AI systems and AI tools within the context of their discipline. At the end of the day, they need some foundations, and everyone should be getting the same foundations on what AI is.
If you want to be a poet or a physicist, you get the same foundations.
Absolutely. You still need to know what AI systems are. What are the capabilities? What are the limitations? And how do you use them?
Every appropriate graduate should be graduating with those basic fundamental skills and understandings, including not just how to use them to achieve outcomes, but also ethically and responsibly.
Absolutely. I think those fundamentals, when they start using them, that's when they need to also be taught how to think about what they are using it for, what information is being leveraged in getting to an answer, and is that an appropriate use of information? We should also be teaching them what the impacts of leveraging an answer or a solution that is obtained by the system are, as we apply it in the context of our society.
Yes.
To me, that is the ethical and responsible part. We have to build a mindset around everything that we use and leverage that information for. We have to ask the right questions. How will this translate to the impact that it will have based on how we have used that information and the decision that we have come to in using that information?
If we're successful, I'll put it all on you. I take no responsibility. No, if we're responsible in this, every OU student over the next several years will graduate with this basic understanding. They'll then graduate with not just a basic understanding of AI, but also specifically how to employ and deploy it in their particular field. Very different for poets than for physicists. But also this understanding of the ethical and responsible use and the larger questions that attach to that, more of the philosophical as they engage in leadership in their fields and beyond.
Absolutely. I think that's where that escalation needs to come in, where, beyond the fundamentals as they progress, the journey of a student entails both maturity in their understanding of the world they live in, but also maturity in the discipline that they are actually studying. As that knowledge increases, should their knowledge in AI also increase, but it should be in the context of their increasing maturity in the discipline? How do they now leverage the capabilities of AI systems in their discipline? I think if they understand that better, they will also understand the limitations of those systems. To me, that is also creating an environment for new innovation. Because if you understand the limitations, then we will also translate this into innovations, new research, and new directions on how we can build these systems to be even better than what they are today.
Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating moment. I know you hear every day the fears people have of it's going to be the greatest thing that ever happens or the worst thing that ever happens. In higher education, you also hear the conversation about, "Is it commoditizing education?" Are we nimble enough to adapt to it? One of the ways that I see your role when you've already had a major impact is getting us inside of higher education to accept and adapt. It can be a calcified industry at times, and right now is no time for that, is it?
No. I think this space is moving very rapidly. There are innovations happening every day. Its impacts are being felt every day. It is disruptive, like many other technologies have been. Oftentimes, we have encountered technologies that have been disruptive to specific disciplines. This is not one of those. This is a technology that is disruptive to every discipline, and disruption does create a little bit of anxiety, and it's rightful.
Let me ask you, do you think it's an understatement? The reason I say this is because what I see in this moment, and obviously, you're the expert, and I'm the one way outside of it, but what I see is the intersection of the greatest evolutionary step in human knowledge. Which is technically driven by computer scientists like yourself who are world class that understand it all the way down to its essence, its core, and its fundamentals, and the ones and the zeros and all those things that exist that have gone from analog now to this amazing world of machine learning. I see that in direct friction with the very utmost human emotion of fear and fear of change. That managing and navigating that intersection between the utterly human and the utterly quantum move that we're taking. I guess quantum comes next. Is that what you manage most of the days when you have conversations?
Absolutely. That fear of change.
It's a fundamental fear.
It's a fundamental fear.
People hate change.
Absolutely. But it's also okay to be in that position, right? It's okay because there is a lot of uncertainty ahead of us. Yes, there are fears associated with AI systems. AI systems offer certain benefits, but just like any other technical innovation, they can also be not always beneficial. Trying to figure out the process of what the benefits are and how we leverage that? How do we minimize and mitigate the risks that come along with it? That is the process of change, and I think it's a collective effort. We will all have to go through it. The reality is that there are true benefits that the capabilities offer. At the end of the day, it is also our responsibility to know how to maximize those benefits, how to leverage them to the best we can in order to further our society, address the challenges that we face today as a society, as humans, as the entire world. It is part of our responsibility, and that responsibility will have to somehow involve the process of change and change management.
That to me is what's stunning about a comprehensive research university like OU, is that you have the disciplines that go from the deepest of STEM subjects, all the way to the humanities. The reality is that the connection between those is what we have to master to actually wind up with the positives that can flow from it and to avoid the negatives that come from it.
To me, I think this is the time to engage. This is not the time to step back. This is the time to engage because no one has the answer, but collectively, we have the ability to get to an answer. This is a call to engage for all of us in the field in the society, because together, we'll figure out how to maximize the benefit, and how to still be able to leverage these systems, to the extent of improving our lives and our society.
That's it. To change lives. Absolutely. That's what we do. We change lives. Last question, and let's see if you can do it in maybe two sentences. Dr. Shah's legacy at the University of Oklahoma, if everything were to be successful, will help us answer this question. Students should come to the University of Oklahoma, and faculty should come to the University of Oklahoma right now, in this moment, and they should do it in part because Dr. Shah accomplished these things as the chief inaugural chief AI officer.
Well, I would like to say that I think we as a university, my vision and hope would be that we work towards building an educational environment, an experience for our students, where whatever the cutting-edge technologies are, are part of their overall experience journey. It's part of their educational experience, and we produce graduates who are ready to embrace these. They have the fundamentals. They will take that, and they will translate that into things that will change our world. Today it's AI. Tomorrow could be something else.
It could be quantum computing.
It could be quantum computing. I think our legacy should be that we, as a university, are enablers to whatever comes next, whatever is going to help them be the next leaders to change the world.
I love it. I think that's a perfect ending to that question. It may have been more than two sentences.
I'm a professor at the end of the day, so please.
We do speak in 50-minute soundbites. That's exactly right. Doctor Shah, thank you. Thank you for what you're doing for the university, for our students, for our faculty. Your scholarship and your research make a fundamental difference, and I love the idea that there's a new future that we collectively should be leading and that when our students come here, because of your efforts and so many faculty, our students come in here, and they leave with the ability to truly change lives.
Thank you for what you're doing for us. Thank you for joining this show. While I'm passing out thank yous, thank you, most of all, to all of you who are listening, we are absolutely honored to have you. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Conversations with the President.
