Dr. Dionne Curbeam of Coppin State educates Nestor on cybersecurity, passwords and the never-ending IT challenges we all face. Next up: AI literacy and the impact of social media on privacy. A thought-provoking and spirited chat with an educator who made learning this valuable information more fun than it should be…
Nestor Aparicio interviews Dr. Dionne Curbeam, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Coppin State University, about cybersecurity, passwords, and the challenges of digital technology. Dr. Curbeam emphasizes the importance of multi-factor authentication, regular password changes, and avoiding simple passwords. She discusses the generational divide between digital immigrants and natives, the impact of social media on privacy, and the need for AI literacy. Dr. Curbeam also highlights the role of AI in transforming jobs and the necessity of retraining the workforce. She concludes by praising Coppin State’s students and faculty, and expresses her commitment to the university’s growth.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cybersecurity, passwords, digital immigrants, digital natives, multi-factor authentication, data privacy, biometrics, social media, AI boot camp, fact-checking, prompt engineering, generative AI, technology advancement, educational malpractice, Coppin State University
SPEAKERS
Dr. Dionne Curbeam, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore, positive. We’re positively into the springtime month around here in March Madness and all the good stuff that comes along with it, basketball. And if you have tuned in here this week, you have heard me act tournament action. Hopefully the ladies are gonna play a little longer this weekend as we get together around here in our partnership with COVID state. I press Dr Jenkins, I did this during the holiday parties. Well that I attended downtown with all sorts of cool people who are eagles, about getting more people on and more information and more professors, and I knew they had doctors hiding over there at Coppin State that I could bring on and as part of our spring series. And I want to give everybody a shout out over at Coppin, where I couldn’t even park a couple of weeks ago for the homecoming before I had Hall of Famer, my long time pal Gary Williams on last week, I have just met Doctor Deon Kirby. She is the chief information which I always need to get more information. She’s the Chief Information and Technology person and the Vice President over at COVID state. And I have been told she will be effusive with fun and information and passwords and privacy security, which always sort of freak me out in a Google Apple iPhone kind of world they’re trying to set up Apple Pay. Is it safe? As they once said in a movie, welcome. Dr Kirby, how are you? Hello. Hello. How are you? I’m great. I’m great. I feel like every time I have a cop in person on not roughing but all the rest, I sit up straight and I try to learn things, and I try to be taught things and all that. Well,
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 01:44
that’s enough straight. Let me sit up straight so I could be who I’m supposed to be as Dr Kirby today, you
Nestor Aparicio 01:49
told me your chief nerd over at Coppin on your own terms. And I would just say I’m 56 years old. I think you’re a little younger than me, based on the math. But there is a point for any of us who are over the age of like 3035, wherever that Gen Y, Z, X thing is, for all of us that we I didn’t grow up with this thing, but, man, I had a kid who was a little younger than me that when that little envelope showed up on my first flip phone and I said, What is that envelope looks like a letter, and I Don’t speak emoji. Well, I don’t do well
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 02:20
because we’re digital immigrants. We were not born into this. Um, your children are considered digital natives. They were actually born after certain time that they probably came out with a cell phone in their hand, and as soon as the the doctor smacked their bottom, they’re probably texting. Somebody said, What is this man doing? Where most of us were digital immigrants. You know, we remember things such as the rotary dial, dare I say the eight track player, you know, actually being a human remote. So the perception of how we engage the technology is very different between those two generations. So I’m considered an immigrant because I remember having a typewriter, um, prior to me going over to a computer,
Nestor Aparicio 03:02
can I tell you a story, just to educate people here? All right, so I am missing a finger. Okay, so I had a lawnmower accident here. Okay, you went to school for journalism because I’ve looked you up on LinkedIn, and I have been a journalist all my life, since I was 15 years old at the news American when I was 13 years old in high school 10th grade, a man named Alex polanis was the typewriting teacher. So when I went to go to school, and Don Mohler is a big part of this former Baltimore County Executive met me. He was my guidance counselor at Dundalk High School, and I all I wanted to do was be Richie Cunningham. I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a sports writer. I wanted to be Oscar Madison, and I knew that I needed to learn how to type and type writing as a kid was, there was one person in neighborhood that had a little typewriter, and you had, you had a ribbon, and it had, we didn’t even have white out. We had white ribbon. I’m talking like in the 70s, right? I went to class and I’m, I swear on my life, this is true. We had typewriters in Dundalk High School, right down in the hallway by the breezeway, and the type the typewriter had one of these on it, and I’m missing a finger, and I was doing the Christopher Columbus, like looking at the T and looking at the because I can’t the why are the chicken pecking right? Mister polanis came and took a white sheet of paper, and he taped it down over my the top of the keyboard. And I’m being honest with you, I’m that you’re gonna laugh, but it’s a serious thing. I put my hand under my my the nerve ending in this would not allow me to hit that without a lot of pain, right, right? So I literally got up. I didn’t cry because I was 13 or 14. I just said, Mr. Polanis, I have to go to the office. And I went down the office and said, I’m transferring. I cannot learn to type like this. And then I got a job at the news American, and it had soft keys. And I learned soft keys. I’m probably 70 or 80 words a minute. Probably. Much I could, I could run an office typing over the last 43 years, but it was the single barrier to if I did not learn to do this, if I quit for life, wow, I don’t know where I’d be in life if I didn’t learn how to type
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 05:15
Right exactly. But, you know, when I took typing, I started taking typing in middle school, and I remember it was literally the bane of my existence. I hated typing class. I was the worst class ever. And my mother was a secretary at the time at, I believe, Johns Hopkins Hospital. So she was an expert typer. So she was like, well, Dion, you have to learn how to type. But what I find interesting now is that typing is this, what’s the two some that they’re now learning how to be efficient with your typing, because now people are doing things on keyboards, but on on your keypad, on your phone. But also, what’s interesting for accessibility purposes, we now have the natural voice recognition. So even instead of typing, we can now do dictation. So be it on your phone, be it on Microsoft Word, wherever you push the dictation button, and it will dictate everything. So another way of technology is changing. We have to learn how to type anymore. Typing is a lost I feel like
Nestor Aparicio 06:20
I need to be Thornton melon. I need to go back to school. I, you know, I just need to learn some things and that. But really, in the, in the that was, I mean, I’m going back to the 80s and typing, and kids would say, What do you mean? I don’t know how to type in typing. I came out with a keyboard. To your point, digital natives or not, people a little younger didn’t have an email address, or didn’t learn how to text or then took on whatever, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, wherever you are in the digital space. But now we have young people coming to you, some of them COVID babies, and different people that had got trapped in their homes and Wi Fi. It can be really, really overwhelming, I think even to me, in regard to passwords, in regard to security. My I mean, I have a web company at Baltimore positive, my web developer, Mike Dion, my Dr, curb Bemo, my side, Jessica falls hit me. She said, You need to password. I’m like, Yes, I don’t want that on WordPress. You have to have that. I have a Google Authenticator. I’ve watched my wife, who’s a Verizon engineer, fight with this at 804, every morning to try to log in like it is a and now we bring the Russians and the Chinese into this. It is. It’s scary to take this data. It is. But,
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 07:38
you know, it is. But you know, people in my role, and I’m the person in your role, and be more positive, our job is to make sure that we keep you safe. And sometimes it might seem like an inconvenience when we do multi factor authentication, meaning that you have that you have to go to your phone and things of that nature. But we have these bad character actors that are super smart, that are always trying to find ways to outsmart us. I had a situation that I enjoy shopping, that’s one of my vices and I and somewhat, somehow, they were able to buy gift cards on my Macy’s account at three o’clock in the morning. Unfortunately, I have my account set up that I had an alert that if something happens, and so forth, and they knew my buying patterns, so they knew that something was amiss, so they were able to easily reverse those gift cards, and they alerted me. I had to change my password and things of that nature. So our data and our privacy is of the utmost importance. That’s why it’s important that we always change our passwords regularly. Usually it’s 90 days, maybe it’s every six months, even doing pillow talk. Don’t share your passwords because you never know how it’s going to accidentally leak out. Never write your password down. I’ve seen people, have gone into offices and their password is on a sticky note, and it say whatever, and then make sure that your password has a combination of complexity that never use, oh, you know the name of your dog, Snoopy, or zoom, or 12345, but something that can be a little bit difficult to guess. Now we’re moving into the sphere of biometrics, which you’re an apple head. You love apple so, you know, we can just look at our phone in the biometrics. They scan us, and they actually read our biometric eyes. So they actually are now unlocking our devices. Our thumbprint, or our fingerprint, is also another unique way, but our character actors are getting smarter, so we always have to make sure we do our due diligence to stay safe, because, trust me, it’s never fun, and thank god I’ve never had this happen to me, but I know people who have to wake up in the morning and your bank account says zero, or somebody has put a mortgage out in your name, and you never have created this mortgage, or they’ve created. Credit cards in your name, because that’s what happens if people can get even a sliver of your PII, your personal identifying information, and they can make a story about you, and once they make that, they can grab hold and essentially take over your life. I don’t want it to sound scary and like we need to go under our desk and hide, but we need to make sure that we are proactive, that we’re having our passwords. We’re doing multi sector authenticator, and we are protecting our data as possible, as much as possible. Boy, I
Nestor Aparicio 10:29
needed this today. I really did. Dr Dionne Kirby is here. She is with COVID state. Um, she is giving us a little bit of wisdom. She runs things around there on the information technology. So I need you to explain to me on campus. You just gave a great advice. I think, for anybody kids coming on campus are younger people, more gullible, less gullible, more you know, fake. Well, I don’t have a lot. They don’t have a lot to steal from me. But or have they grown up in this world where weird passwords and remembering them things for me, like I literally have to list these passwords and stuff, and I’m thinking to myself, if I have 50 of them in my life, and have to change all of them every 90 days, and you want all of them to be different, and the gobbledygook passwords that they make for you with all sorts of things are completely impossible to remember. When you’re at a concert on Ticketmaster and your phone’s out, you’re trying to get in, like things that really any of this could affect you in and above, just losing your phone or not having enough battery, or just silly things like that, but just things in my phone with all of these different passwords and these chains that remember the passwords I don’t trust any of it like I’m I’m a great guy for you, because you’ll be like, do you do this? Nope, nope, nope, that don’t do that. But, yeah, I mean, because I am very weary of it, just walking into all that, I don’t do Apple, pay any of that kind of stuff. I pay with the credit card. I pay the cash. There’s two ways I pay. You know what I mean? There’s a couple of little things I do. I would just say, maybe good life advice, as I get older and the gray comes out, is keep it small. Yeah, just less is more in a lot of ways, a lot of things on Facebook, I don’t get involved, I haven’t been hacked or any of that stuff, because I don’t play in those third party I don’t play chain games and all of those kinds of things. But, um, but I’m weary. You know, you scare me, but I’m already scared, I
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 12:27
know. And sometimes, sometimes being in this seat, it almost makes me slightly, um, anxious, because I see what happens. So I am very, very cautious to follow the things that I say. But also to your point about the next generation, I wouldn’t necessarily say that they are more gullible. I would say maybe they aren’t yet as aware. I think there are two pathways. There’s the pathways of the younger people that just aren’t aware. They’re always on Tiktok, always on social media, posting their location, sharing their location, they are more willing to to negate some of their privacy functions in order for convenience, for an example,
Nestor Aparicio 13:12
and that also exposes their security though they they’re weighing the weighing you have to is this a good decision or a bad decision? Period,
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 13:20
absolutely. I mean, every you know, do you want to always share your location on all these sites? Why do they need it? What is the value? How is it going to help you? If they don’t need to know your location, then don’t share it. If they don’t need to have access to your full picture roster, then why have access to it? If they don’t, the less they can have on your data, the better, and the more private you can become, and you become more secure then.
Nestor Aparicio 13:47
And some kids say, I want to be famous. Because I was a kid who wanted to be famous, right?
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 13:53
Be famous. I think maybe. And then there are some who have, who’ve parents have over saturated their digital footprint that posting every picture of them on Facebook, or my child did this, and my child did that, and now they’re kind of in that young adult years, and they’re like, Okay, I’ve grown up with everybody knowing who I am. I don’t know these people because my parents have literally posted my pictures since birth. I want to take a step back from social media. I want to take a step back from some of this, and I want to reduce my digital footprint so we have both of those pathways, and we’re starting to see more of the emergence of the younger people who have been oversaturated, having been grown up with their parents, posting everything of their first step to their graduation from high school and everything in between. On social media. Can you imagine, and you’re a public figure, so it’s different for you. But can you imagine just being a kid and someone’s like, oh, wow, I know you. You’re so and so’s child because you did this was, well, I
Nestor Aparicio 14:57
have a son and and it speaks to. This is my son. Grew up running around, doing radio with me in the 90s, and he has pulled himself completely off of social media, I would say, since the first time Trump was around, you know, maybe the last seven or eight years. He literally exited all of it. Literally lives very happily and quietly. And people ask me every day, is your son? Okay? Yeah, my son just like, doesn’t really dig me even posting. We haven’t never even had that conversation to be honest with you, he’s 41 years old. I just don’t put a whole lot of pictures of him up. Maybe I make fun of him, poke him on his birthday or something like that. But, like, in general sense, maybe if we’re like, twice a year, we’ll take a picture more out together, and I’ll put it up to let people know he’s alive. And still, sometimes his hair is pink, sometimes it’s green blue. People ask those questions, but like, he just doesn’t want to be involved. And I’m like, good for you. Good you know, like a lot
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 15:52
of people in that demographic, and a little bit younger, who would just oversaturated, and they’re just like, enough is enough. I want to retreat from social media. I want to live authentically in real life. I don’t need to justify and broadcast my entire life on social media, but they’re living happy lives. And sometimes I think that we have this crutch of social media, thinking that for most people, that is the authentic world. And then a lot of people have this comparison effect to say, oh, everybody’s traveling to Jamaica, going to Dubai. They’re living their best life. Well, here I am. All I get to go to is Cherry Hill or the Hunt Valley. That’s all I get to do. And so my life is not as good as these other people doing these great things on social media, so it’s also causing a lot of different mental health challenges, because they’re comparing themselves to what they think is the reality, or the high standard of life, the high standard of beauty, the high standard of how I am supposed to live. And they and some people, feel that if I’m not meeting what the social media metric is then my life is subpar, and that’s not the case. We have to understand that technology is technology, and sometimes what we see on things like social media is not always reality, and sometimes doing that detox and not always being engulfed in social media can help our wellness, help our balance, and help us discover our true, authentic selves, not
Nestor Aparicio 17:27
to mention our posture. You know this thing here with the neck? Oh my gosh, my wife, this morning, I said to her, screw my shoulder up to be on my phone in bed because of my neck and my angle and where I need to be after being here, doing, as you pointed out, The Truman Show that I do here each and every day. Dr Dion Kirby is here. She’s with our partners at complex state, and it’s just a pleasure to have her on. We’re kind of having some coffee chat talk here about really important stuff. She’s the Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. I just want to ask you this, because you’re, yeah, young, old timers, sort of like me. I’ve looked at your LinkedIn and Bucha and your background, how much of this did you see coming over the last two decades? Even as a self proclaimed nerd in the space and with the school for this, I don’t even know if you knew what you were going to school for when you went to school for it, because the same things, like I started typing on that typewriter in 1984 not in any way thinking there would be this Jetsons thing that, I mean, I saw a picture of a card catalog in the Dewey Decimal System. You know, we used to say, this is the old this is why I used to Google things we went to the library, right? I mean, these kids will never know that, but it really is an amazing world we live in, in to let live this long, to have this level of technology that is ultra convenient, if I want to go to New York today and find the best bagel and or anywhere in the world, and I mean, I have been a first first. I was a map nerd as a kid like Graham McNally, and I wanted to
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 19:01
go to stadium, early adopt. You. Early adopter. I would
Nestor Aparicio 19:04
just say, you know, having employees of mine who are grown ass adults who didn’t know north from south, from east, from West. And I’m like, because they’ve had Google Matt, like, they just know. They know. They put it in, and the thing takes them there. Now the cars are going to do that, right? And I’m like, my goodness, if I didn’t know the sun, I had a young lady on the Street in Manhattan. This was a young lady like a college young lady 20s, old enough to have a beverage. Say to me, is the Park East or West during a sunset off a subway? And I looked at the sun, and it was five in the afternoon, I said, well, the sun is setting over there, if it was east or west. And I said, Wow, so I’m just saying the conveniences of Google Maps alone, just in something that younger people have never had to really think, is that way Dundalk in that way, Woodlawn, or is that way buoy in that way? Coppin? And sort of knowing all of that, it’s made life easier, but it’s also made for people our age to have come at all all of this, having had a Dewey Decimal System and a
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 20:12
card catalog. And you know what? It’s interesting, because as technology continues to advance, we will always change in the way of our cognition and the way of how things are done, the way how we do things, we lose something every generation as technology advances. For an example, when we were growing up, and I’m a graduate of poly, so we remember those t1 calculators that we had to use, and you probably had one in high school with the calculators. But the generation before us was so upset because, like, oh my god, I can’t believe they’re using calculators. We did all these equations and calculations by hand.
Nestor Aparicio 20:50
My dad saw the first calculator at luskins in the 70s, and he said, This is going to you know. No, no, no. We either teach you division and you know
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 21:00
exactly, and if you even remember when the onset of television, and they said, Oh my God, here comes television, they were even stories to say, Okay, this is the devil’s box of being able to innovate our individuals, that people are not going to have family time. People want to sit around the TV. So it seems that every time there’s a new innovation, there’s always a something that is lost about the way how things are done the old way, and we conform to a new ideology and style of doing things. We’re seeing that now with generative AI, things such as chat, GPT club, that and I remember that people used to write my running joke at work was I was the Minister of Communications because I was always particularly leaning on my journalism background of things had to be written in a certain way and presented in a certain way. Now, an individual can go right into something like a chat GPT or co pilot and have a whole story or an article written for them in a matter of seconds, whereas it used to be ours. So when we think about these things and how our innovations change, I think we have to have some ground rules that one, whatever it is, we can’t do harm to people. We have to make sure that we’re using it in an in a more efficient way, something that does not allow for bias, that it always support inclusivity, that we’re not excluding people, and to make sure that we have equitable access across the board. You know, even if you think back, going back to television, something that you know now is just a common place. It’s, you know, we don’t even think about it anymore, that where’s the standard of ethics? Are we doing harm with it? How are we doing good? How are we help, helping the human condition? So as we continue to evolve with newer technological innovations, we need to keep those foundational things in mind, because the way, how we do things will change, but our ethics, our integrity and showing inclusivity, those things are something that should never change. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 23:10
you mentioned something, and I just, you know, I think about cliff notes, and I think about, oh my god, remember, you know, like you could buy a term paper somehow on the black market. Then the Internet came and then, you know, and what is plagiarism? You’re a journalist. I’m a journalist. I know. Is it borrowed? Is it stolen? Is it quoted? Is it copyrighted? Is it ethical? You know, is it true? Let’s start with that true. Well, you know, I working at the Baltimore Sun in the 1980s I have written that I had, like editors around me. I had automatic BS detectors everywhere, grown ups everywhere, fact check. I had fact checkers. You know, when I wrote for the paper in the 80s, and it’s made me a different human, especially in trumplandia, in the modern of what is a fact and what is true, and what are you just making up? And where did you hear that? In the game of what we would call phone booth? Ai, wow, wow, wow, man, we went from Mr. Polanis and typewriters to AI. And yes, AI, I’m going to invite you back. Dr Kirby, I like you, so we’re going to have you back off from COVID state. We should do an hour on AI one day. But, oh, we really could teach me a little bit, and I will just say this, this piece we’re doing right now, for anybody at Coppin who’s enjoyed this, or anybody in my radio audience, we used to do these things live on Radio One time they go away, then we learned how to tape them, and you made the eight track players, and we could play them back on the weekends. Now this will be when I’m done with this, it’ll be a video, it’ll be an audio, it’ll be a podcast, it’ll be a it’ll be a blog post. It will be within 30 seconds on otter AI, it will be transcripted, yes, and all of my bomber accent that comes out when I do funny voices like this, it says Speaker One, because it doesn’t recognize me anymore. Oh, so yeah, I can, you know, and I see all of this in the. Last two, three years, I’ve done otter AI, but it was my vision 15 years ago when like Dragon was out on Yes, on software, just to try to take the words we had on radio and make it written word. Absolutely we have surpassed anything I would have dreamed of as a 40 year old, and I’m 56 let alone cars driving themselves and all that. But this, AI, part of this is a fundamental, foundational game changer. It’s going to change the way we think about life, change the way
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 25:33
how we think about life. It’s going to change business. It’s going to change every aspect of how we do things. You just mentioned otter AI, which is one of the note takers, and there’s so many there’s read AI otter co pilot, and they’re coming more and more on the scene every day. Imagine the actual piece of it when you had secretaries that would do dictation and have to do note taking, that would sometimes take a day if they were transcribing meetings now they can have it done in an hour. So in looking at this on a larger scale, that makes us think, how do we train the next generation of individuals to be part of an AI world? One of the things I always say, and I heard someone say this a lot of times, we do educational malpractice, that we are preparing our students for a world that no longer exists, that we’re training them and things such as the calculator or the typewriter would now we’re actually on AI. So what skills do we need to start teaching and training. One of them you mentioned is about fact checking, because sometimes Something may come out of AI, but it may not always be correct, so understanding how to do that fact checking understand what we call prompt engineering, which is now a brand new career of understanding how to craft the right prompts, to get the right information out of a large language model or an AI program, and being able to reciprocate that information, so that if they need to go back and forth, that you get the right answers that you need. And also it’s important to have the context of what you’re doing. Let’s say that if I ask an AI product to say, I need a chemical compound, and they tell me to mix bleach and ammonia together, and I don’t know anything about it. And let me go to the store, let me get my bleach, let me get my ammonia. I mix it together, and all of a sudden, boom, here comes some smoke. Well, like well, AI told me to do this. Well, this is where you need that contextual knowledge of science to know that you can’t compoundly mix those two chemicals together because it’s dangerous. So there needs to be some contextual knowledge of understanding what’s coming out to be able to properly understand that what they’re giving me is accurate. So we can have a long conversation about this. And one thing that’s really important is that the job world is going to change. Going back to the otter AI people such as secretaries and receptionists, they may no longer be needed as much to do dictation and transcription. So how are we going to train that workforce so they can still be viable, they can still have jobs, and they can still be part of what’s coming down with this new technology. Does that mean having AI boot camps? Does it mean showing them how they can use that to make their work more efficient, and then also preparing them so as the workforce changes, how they can be part of that next level of revolution, so they won’t lose jobs and they can still be attractive to the business workforce.
Nestor Aparicio 28:59
Dr Dionne Kirby was making her first, but not last appearance here at Baltimore positive. She is the Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. I promise to try to shorten that. I’m not to talk to Dr. That’s just too much for me to say. But I would say this AI boot camp, you said to me, Oh, hold on. Red light went off. Now on our next episode, we’re gonna have an AI boot. Well, I just it’s, I’m getting old enough to see that how all of the technology has come along, from I don’t know how to type to I need this thing to get into anything I want to do, or go anywhere I want to go that I had to master the settings on this device, let alone speak English, no English. Be able to type, be able to interact, be able to communicate, and I, and this is not my wallet in a lot of ways, but it’s an it’s become an appendage for every human being in this culture at this point, even my kid, who’s not on social media, needs this in order to get those things done right. So it. It becomes a learning curve of I remember I met a billionaire once who said he didn’t want one of these because he didn’t know how to type. Well, he’s had to learn how to do that, or learn how to talk into it to get typing, absolutely, to be able to do anything with anybody. And that’s in the last 10 years, this AI thing. It’s a wide spectrum of people afraid of it. Don’t think about it. Don’t see how it’s going to affect their jobs or their culture or their life around them. To other people like you that have been a sponge for learning and technology over two and a half decades to come along to help people like me and teach people like me. But the AI thing, I just it would be like that silly piece of, who is it? Brian Gumball sitting on the couch, or maybe Katie Kirk say there’s this thing called the internet. We like, like, I mean, nobody wanted to learn about that, geo cities and what’s this, and whatever, and but the world had to learn about it. And your grandmother died knowing about it, because she had to know about it, I feel like AI is one of those. It really fundamental things that everyone get to
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 31:05
learn absolutely correct what we’re seeing, and even the way how people are scrambling to learn AI to understand AI is what we saw about what is this internet thing and that like, Well, how do we do it? What are the policies? What are procedures? How do we protect people? And now the internet is just commonplace in our naming convention. So AI is that next thing you know, right now, we’re at that point that there’s flurry, there’s confusion, we still don’t understand that. Some people think it’s going to be the breakthrough and the magic bullet for so many things, but we ultimately it’s not going to go anywhere. We have to embrace it. We must learn it, and we must be able to still have some safeguards around it, because, going back to that data and privacy thing that we talked about, you know, sometimes we put things into these large language models, and unless we have our settings configured to a certain way, our information goes into those large language models, and it helps to train the artificial intelligent thought. So we also have to think about Gee, do I really want my social security number going into this or, gee, do I really want my address going into these things? So that goes back to kind of where we started of understanding and leading with data and privacy as we move further into these large language models. And AI,
Nestor Aparicio 32:26
alright, she is here to make sure you are careful with all of these things and security and passwords. We will have Dr Dion Kirby back as part of our ongoing partnership with COVID state and the mighty Eagles, and you’ll hear some me at basketball here this week as well. So we call them intelligent conversations, and it’s been exciting around what do you love about copping? Before I let you go give me your copy, because you’ve been a cop in long enough to see Jim’s bill. Things happen, you know, you live there long enough to see these things go from something that some kids didn’t have, to every kid has an eye, yeah,
Dr. Dionne Curbeam 33:01
oh my gosh. Almost 18 years I have been a COVID, but ultimately, what keeps me there the students. The students are just amazing. I I always say commencement is my true payday. They are wonderful. They’re resilient, they are intelligent, and they come wanting to learn, and people who want to learn, you can’t get any better in education. And then the division, division of information technology, I work with such a group of talented, dedicated individuals, they inspire me just to continue to be better. And Doctor Jenkins, under his leadership, Coppin is thriving. We are truly a jewel of Baltimore City, and it’s a great time to be there. It’s a great time to elevate our university, and it’s just a wonderful place to be I truly, I truly love Coppin State University, and being there 18 years that shows because just my dedication and my commitment to the university. So anybody, we invite you to come visit Coppin. It’s a great place. The campus is beautiful. Come out and see you sometime. It just go on that
Nestor Aparicio 34:10
day when they’re doing Hall of Fame day when everybody in the world share. You can’t park little homecoming crazy there a couple weeks ago, uh, COVID state making it great. We We appreciate their partnership, as well as what a long time flagship. We did sports and we did basketball and volleyball and softball. We did all that stuff for a long, long time, I have enjoyed these intelligent, we call them wise conversations with folks trying to teach us stuff. Ai boot camp ahead, I’m learning stuff around here. My thanks to Doctor Dion Kirby, thanks for coming on, keep it safe over there and enjoy the springtime. And maybe next time we get together, it should be crab cake, maybe down fadelies Or something is what I’m thinking. You know what? Let’s do it. Love is what I’m talking about. All right. I am Nestor. We are wnst. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore positive. Stay with us. You.
