DMC Student Invited to Governor’s STEM Advisory Council Summit

Connor Brehm ('29) was invited to the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council Summit, where he spoke on a student panel alongside two other participants about artificial intelligence and its role in education.  The event was attended by more than 450 educators, business leaders, and state officials, including Lieutenant Governor Chris Cournoyer,  Co-chair of the Iowa Governor's STEM Advisory Council Diane Young, and Bureau Chief for the Iowa Department of Education Tina Wahlert.  The Summit focused on AI in response to Executive Order 14, which calls for greater integration of artificial intelligence across Iowa’s schools and industries.

Connor was invited to participate after earning runner up in the AI division at the ISU Science and Technology Fair last year, which included over 630 participants from 75 schools.  His project, “Social Modeling with Machine Learning: Predicting Social Groups” used a fine-tuned GPT-2 model to create digital versions of real people and test whether AI could predict how compatible they’d be in conversation. His findings showed that when trained properly, AI could reproduce the same social patterns and levels of agreement as the human participants.  The findings have practical implications in business (hiring and marketing) and social networking.