By SHANNON O. WELLS
At its monthly meeting on Oct. 28, the Senate Computing and Information Technology committee was briefed on a transition from one business intelligence report-writing tool to another as well as a pilot artificial-intelligence service being tailored for the Pitt community.
The replacement of Cognos, an IBM-based legacy business-intelligence report writing tool, is expected to save the University $250,000, while the Pitt GPT pilot program could bring ChatGPT technology to the University community at considerably less cost than the latter name brand.
Chad Burton, executive director for transformation analytics in Pitt’s Information Technology department, said communication has begun regarding the retirement of Cognos, which is used primarily by Pitt support staff personnel. Cognos is being replaced by a system called Tableau.
“In our environment, Tableau has had much better adoption — much easier to use, much more versatile,” he said. “So we’re at a point where we’re going to do a phased approach to retiring Cognos. This will also save the University $250,000 a year in licensing for that tool.”
To quell possible concerns surrounding the transition, Burton emphasized that functionality is not being lost. “We have re-created, and will be until we retire it, all of that (Cognos) functionality. It’ll just be a different place and a slightly different way to get data.”
Currently, Cognos is used for accessing lists of students in a certain major, or students within a certain GPA range for a dean’s list or something similar, as well as used heavily for financial-level reports. “This functionality will all exist in Tableau and another tool.”
As Cognos is based on data packages, IT plans to retire them one package at a time, starting with the least commonly used packages, beginning Nov. 8.
“What’s important to know is that some people saw the announcement and thought all of Cognos was going away Nov. 8. That is not the case at all,” Burton said. “It’s actually just the most seldom-used pieces. We’re doing that in case we identify a gap that maybe we missed. We’ve got plenty of time to adjust our planning before we get to the most heavily used, which is those financial-level awards.”
The switch, he added, is part of an “overall modernization,” and retiring a legacy tool “so that we can invest more time and money in our modern, flexible tools.”
Pitt GPT
In another digital-information update news, Dwight Helfrich, director of the Pitt enterprise initiatives team at Pitt IT introduced a pilot program of “Pitt GPT.” The program is designed along the lines of the wildly popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool, which has taken the artificial intelligence movement by storm in the past year or two.
“The pilot aims to determine if a service like this would be a cost-effective and beneficial enterprise solution,” he said. “Currently, services like ChatGPT are very expensive and really would be too expensive for Pitt to deploy onto a large user base.”
The prototype, Helfrich explained, is similar to ChatGPT, and has several advantages including data security, predefined prompt templates, suggested next prompts, and the financial benefit of paying for only the AI processing that Pitt uses.
“So, this could be much more cost effective,” he said.
A key benefit of Pitt GPT will be the ability to add Pitt data and combine it with large language-model (LLM) functionality. All data uploaded to Pitt GPT will remain secure within the user session and not shared with others at Pitt or outside the University, Burton said.
The in-house system also gives Pitt the ability to add multiple LLMs and use whichever is “most effective for the given prompt.”
This pilot is currently available to a limited number of University faculty and staff, and now includes the Computing committee, whose members were to receive welcoming messages on Oct. 28.
Helfrich emphasized that feedback is a “really important aspect of this pilot, and we encourage all users to provide feedback on what is working well and what could be improved,” he said.
So far, feedback has led to several new features, including the ability to share chats with other users and providing an audit trail tracking what steps are taken in the system’s background.
“When this prototype proves successful, we will seek (a broader) expansion throughout the campus,” he said. “This aims to be an innovative and cost-effective solution.”
Responding to a question about who can currently be added to the pilot-user list, Helfrich said his department is looking for new use cases. “It’s definitely possible for some classes to be added to the pilot. If somebody reaches out to me, we can talk about that.”
Digital Equity and Inclusion Initiative
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Digital Equity and Inclusion Initiative was kicked off in Pittsburgh last summer, said committee co-chair Steve Bell. The committee has been organizing a coalition of organizations around the region.
“I think there were a total of 10 of these organizations (including) United Way, the Greater Pittsburgh Urban League, and some digital equity and digital divide organizations to make up this coalition,” he said, noting the University has gathered information from members of the coalition and put together a proposal that was recently submitted to the NTIA.
“The good news is we think we have a very compelling proposal because of the nature of our coalition,” he said. “Two, we have the potential to serve hundreds of thousands of folks within our region. … The proposal is for, I think $22 million over three years, which is no mean feat.
“We were actually encouraged as a result of the work that we have done leading up to this announcement, to go beyond what the higher-end limit had originally been, by the NTIA themselves,” Belle added.
“So I’d like to keep this group apprised at how things progress over time. We’re hoping to get some feedback in the next month or two on where we stand with that.”
Belle said Pitt is competing with around four similar, large proposals, including from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office, the city of Philadelphia “with a coalition similar to ours,” and the nonprofit KINBER “to kind of fill in the spaces outside of Pittsburgh to Harrisburg to Philadelphia. And we work very closely with KINBER.”
“So, fingers crossed, there’s a lot of benefit that will come from this award in terms of helping folks who are, quite frankly, underserved and less fortunate,” he said. “That’s one we’re going to be doing.”
Belle also mentioned that much work also has been underway on the “broadband side,” including several coalitions around the commonwealth using a “coordinated approach” to go after some of the $1.2 billion from the “Build Back Better” legislation infrastructure money allotted to Pennsylvania. “So, more to come on that front as well.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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