At Miami-Dade College’s Kendall Campus on Tuesday, there was the opening of a new facility aimed at training students in emerging technologies and applied AI.
It’s called AI Innovation Hub, and any student, regardless of their major or degree, has access to the brand-new 7,000 square foot facility.
In Building 6 at the campus, there are nine different spaces to prepare students for careers in cybersecurity, networking, technologies, and artificial intelligence.
One of the students who has benefited, and will continue to benefit from this hub, is 55-year-old Jessie Flores.
“You always think about, ‘I want to do something,’ but you never know how to do it,” Flores said. “You don’t have the tools, you only have the ideas.”
But through AI classes, she was able to have her dream come true, through an app she created.
“That [the app] can help solo business owners within Miami-Dade County to establish more discipline in the business, helping them to book their appointments and to have more intelligence,” she said.
It’s one of the many skills students learn here, thanks to the various spaces.
In one room is the Metaverse Arch Studio.
It’s where students are introduced to virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies.
Students explained to NBC6 that they designed a building prototype and then used a 3D program to provide a virtual reality experience to showcase the inside and experience of the building.
Across the Metaverse Arch Studio is the Robotech Lab. It’s where students like 4th-year, Sofia Milan can design, build, and program robotic systems.
Milan explains her design.
“I have a micro camera that is acting as the pupil of the eye, and then I will connect it here, and this will go in this socket, and it will have a humanoid’s movements, and it will have the camera showing you all of the facial and object detections that it catches,” she said.
The other spaces include the Networking Solutions Lab, which provides students with hands-on experience working with networks, routers, switches and cabling systems.
They also become versed in wireless configuration and infrastructure security.
Another space includes The Nook Huddle, where students can brainstorm, come up with prototype ideas, and collaborate across different disciplines.
There’s also a Cybersecurity classroom, which teaches students threat detection, digital forensics, and network defense by having them experience it in realistic simulation experiences.
There is a Cognitive Applications Lab that explores data modeling, analytics, and predictive technologies through computing resources.
The Smart Solutions Center is the entire hub’s central teaching space that can be converted for presentations and industry events.
The biggest space is the AI installation, where visitors to the hub are welcomed by an interactive voice -activated technology that responds to questions in real-time.
Another space provides an AI Applications Studio, solely focusing on AI, cloud systems and natural language processing.
As one of the studio’s professors, Dr. Ernesto Lee explains, it’s the skill sets that allow students to help our local community.
“We are looking at how AI can move the needle for Miami businesses,” he said. “So, we are looking at how we can define workflows, how AI can be integrated into workflows, how it can be integrated into robots.”
Flores continued.
“There are so many problems we can solve in the community with AI, and we need more people to get exposed to the AI, so we can fix those problems together,” she said.