AI COLLAB Offering (Academic / Industry Collaboration)
Creating Wins for Participating Institutional Members, Students and Faculty
Penn State Service Systems Engineering
https://www.servicesystems.psu.edu/
Engineering the 21st Century Service Economy
SSE encompasses the study, design, and implementation of new systems that improve the processes and efficiencies of the service sector. SSE’s mission is to contribute to the College of Engineering’s and the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering’s strategic goals to enhance our students’ fundamental educational experience, awareness of the societal challenge in the United States where 80% of the workforce is employed in the service sector, access to the entrepreneurial opportunities of the sector and collaboration with industry and alumni partners to improve the productivity and quality of the service sector.
“This project is an ideal capstone experience for our students because they had to work in a multi-disciplinary team (industrial engineering and computer science students) to learn about cutting-edge technologies that are not covered in the curriculum and then apply it to solve a real-world problem. This project also provided our students a context to explore and hone soft skills like leadership, engaging stakeholders, and ethics in AI.”
– Dr. Vittal Prabhu
“Put Penn State IEs to work and you get results – even in the brand new world of Generative AI“
– Toni Rae
Approach: The team started out by conducting quick sprints or practice runs on historic service innovations to create content using generative AI tools. These quick sprints were instrumental in getting the team hands-on-experience to learn about generative AI tools. Building on these learnings, the first draft of the playbook was made. This draft was used to survey a number of potential users and the sponsors to get early feedback. The final playbook incorporates this feedback. The team also created an AI Tool Selection Guide, Quality and Productivity Framework, and 3 example case studies that can be referenced by ISSIP volunteers when creating content with AI.
Learning: This project gave our team hands-on-learning experience about generative AI tools, which getting a lot of attention in the society today. Furthermore, addressing the needs of ISSIP gave a real, practical context in which we can apply our newly gained knowledge and skills. The deliverable of our project is to create a playbook to help ISSIP volunteers create content using generative AI tools about historic service innovations. This project not helped our team learn about cutting-edge generative AI tools but also leverages what we learnt to make it easer for ISSIP volunteers to create addtionaly content, which in turn will have the broader impact on informing our society about services.
