Innovación IMFD conducts training on the fundamentals and use of AI at the University of Valparaíso

Bringing the main advances in artificial intelligence to the academic engineering community: this is the objective with which the IMFD's Directorate of Innovation and Technology Transfer conducted practical and theoretical training on the fundamentals and tools of AI at the University of Valparaíso, as part of the Engineering 2030 program.

The activity took place at both the Santiago and Valparaíso headquarters, with two sessions: Fundamentals and Tools of AI; and Applications, Ethics, and Challenges. The training sessions were led by Hernán Sarmiento, Director of Innovation at IMFD, together with Juan Alegría, PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile and IMFD student.

What most interested the participants was the use of large language models (LLMs) to solve specific tasks. In particular, how tools based on this technology can support certain tasks such as text generation and summarization, among others. For this very reason, the focus was not only on what these tools are, but also on understanding how these models work, so that attendees can leverage them to their full potential," said Hernán Sarmiento after completing the activity at the University of Valparaíso.

The IMFD Innovation Experience

This activity is part of the Engineering 2030 program, which seeks to transform engineering faculties and schools in Chile so that they adopt international standards of academic excellence, applied research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The IMFD Innovation Department made available its expertise in data science, machine learning, natural language processing, information visualization, geospatial data, and other key areas for digital transformation.

During the conference, topics ranged from the fundamentals of artificial intelligence to the practical use of platforms such as Google Colab, Hugging Face, and OpenAI. "We believe that participants should understand the importance of data management in the use of AI, as well as distinguish between the main approaches and techniques in this discipline," said Juan Alegría, adding that it is also very important "to be able to explore use cases, particularly for engineering, and identify associated ethical risks, such as bias, interpretability, and fairness."

With these training sessions, IMFD's Innovation department reinforces its commitment to putting its experience and knowledge at the service of society, which in this case had a regional focus, contributing to the advancement of decentralized technological development with a local impact.