Speaker: Professor Marya Cokar, PhD
Lecturer, Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL)
Overview
This seminar is part of the continuing series from Rice University Leading Engineering and Technology Innovation in the Digital Revolution. Project management and technical leadership seminars, as well as a networking mixer occurred this fall. This is the final seminar of the series for this year.
The series is designed to expose engineers at corporations and scaling startups to skills needed to lead engineering without leaving engineering. It is brought to you by Rice University’s engineering faculty in collaboration with Ion. Rice faculty will provide introductions to concepts to help engineers take leadership roles in producing the best products and services for the market responsibly.
Biography
Marya Cokar holds a BSc and PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Calgary. Marya started her career in the oil sands in Alberta. She has always had a passion for academia and started her teaching career at the University of Calgary as a sessional instructor, and has been a part of the instructional faculty at Rice University since 2015 in the Chemical and Biomolecular engineering department and more recently in RCEL where she teaches Technical Ethical Leadership for the Master’s of Engineering Management and Leadership (MEML) degree program.
Dr. Cokar is currently the CTO and Co-founder of Biosfera Group LLC an energy transition startup based out of Houston Texas. With more than ten years of expertise in laboratory experimental design, Marya has focused on microbial gas generation in petroleum reservoirs and the kinetics and DNA analysis of anaerobic microorganisms in subsurface systems. Her proficiency extends to thermal reservoir modeling, where she has years of experience in reservoir geomechanics, fracture, and wellbore prediction. She has published over 20 peer-reviewed publications, along with a book chapter on heat transport.
Abstract
The 21st century brought the fourth industrial revolution and the need for expanded leadership theories and competencies that incorporated Industry 4.0 technologies, such as data science and artificial intelligence (AI).
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming an integrated part of our business practices. It is essential that leaders understand the complexities that exist with these models and use of generative AI in the workplace. There are several challenges with LLMs some of which include societal biases in generative text and imagery, the models being trained by specific data sets which focus on a certain part of society, potentially marginalizing global voices as well as the environmental impact of LLMs as these models become more in demand so does their energy demand, privacy concerns with the models using data without the knowledge of authors and artists, as well as potentially enabling cheating in the academic or work environment with homework solutions, writing academic articles or making it easier for the user to falsify data.
Through this talk we aim to equip technical leaders with insights and strategies to promote ethical, sustainable, and inclusive approaches to leverage LLMs in their fields. Join RCEL and register to attend and an opportunity for networking and discussion following this insightful seminar on navigating the challenges of generative AI.
