Emerging Technologies’ AI: Community of Practice (AICoP) is a multidisciplinary gathering of curious minds exploring the practical applications of artificial intelligence across Columbia University. The community provides a platform for learning, discussion, and experimentation—helping to demystify AI, encourage exploration, and foster inclusive collaboration.
In this session, OpenAI will demonstrate how AI-assisted development tools like Codex can help faculty, analysts, and administrators more quickly create useful tools from institutional data. Through live demonstrations, participants will see how natural language prompts can generate working dashboards and other applications that support decision-making across campus. OpenAI says the new Codex is evolving beyond code generation to tasks that require gathering and synthesizing information, problem-solving, writing, and more.
Agenda
- Welcome & Introductions
- Brief introduction to OpenAI and the presenters.
- Overview of the session goals and structure.
- Topic Overview
- Challenges of accessing and using institutional data.
- Why traditional analytics workflows are often slow or require specialized technical resources.
- How AI-assisted development tools are changing the way campus tools can be built.
- Core Content / Presentation
Live demonstrations showing how Codex can generate working tools from natural language prompts, including:
- Building a simple campus analytics dashboard from raw datasets
- Rapidly prototyping a small application without traditional software development workflows
Participants will see how prompts translate directly into working code and interfaces.
- Practical Examples / Use Cases
Two examples relevant to higher education:
- Campus Analytics Dashboard — a simple dashboard that allows faculty or administrators to explore enrollment or course performance data
- Research & Grant Analysis — using AI to analyze grant proposal documents and surface key themes, risks, or alignment with funding priorities
- Discussion & Q&A
- Open discussion on potential campus applications.
We look forward to what should be a practical discussion on how AI-assisted development may open new possibilities for working with data, prototyping tools, and supporting decision-making across higher education.
Meeting Details
Date: March 27th
Time: 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
You will need a Zoom account to join the session. If you do NOT already have a Zoom account, visit columbiauniversity.zoom.us and Sign in with your UNI to create your basic Zoom account.