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KU News: Kansas educators explore the future of learning through AI

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From the Office of Public Affairs | https://www.news.ku.edu

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Kansas educators explore the future of learning through AI

LAWRENCE — What if schools could harness the full potential of artificial intelligence, technology and data to reimagine teaching and learning? That’s the vision behind the Center for Reimagining Education (CRE) and its partnership with school districts to help educators lead the transformation of how students learn and how teachers teach. Last week, 30 educators from six Kansas districts, including in Butler and Jefferson counties, participated in Professional Learning and Collaboration Days hosted by CRE.

Matching skills with jobs in mutual fund industry leads to higher risk-adjusted performance, study finds

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor of business is co-author of a new paper titled “Finding your calling: Matching skills with jobs in the mutual fund industry.” The researchers identified instances when this matching happens for fund managers, then studied the benefits. Professor Gjergji Cici advocates for CEOs of companies both in and out of the financial industry to create structures or processes that provide more opportunities for their employees to find roles or tasks that best match their skills.

 

Full stories below.

 

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Contact: Chance Dibben, Achievement & Assessment Institute, [email protected]
Kansas educators explore the future of learning through AI

LAWRENCE — What if schools could harness the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI), technology and data to reimagine teaching and learning? That’s the vision behind the Center for Reimagining Education (CRE) and its partnership with school districts to help educators lead the transformation of how students learn and how teachers teach.

“One of the great ironies is that schools are oftentimes critiqued, and the solution is to just do more of the same and thinking that’s the way things will get better,” said Rick Ginsberg, co-founder of CRE and dean of the School of Education & Human Sciences. “We’re encouraging educators to change the way we do things.”

Amid growing national conversations about AI in classrooms, Kansas educators are taking action. Last week, 30 educators from six Kansas districts participated in Professional Learning and Collaboration Days hosted by CRE, a center within the Achievement & Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas.

These events are part of CRE’s statewide effort, which includes three cohorts made up of nine districts across eight counties. Rather than asking educators to travel, CRE staff go directly to schools throughout the year, offering in-person coaching and collaboration tailored to each cohort’s unique goals for reimagining teaching and learning with AI. CRE staff also provide online meetings and coaching throughout the year.

“We want to learn how to use it, teach our kids how to use it and give them a step ahead of everybody else,” said Deanna Herrin, a math teacher from Buhler High School. “I’m really looking forward to being able to get the students to direct their own learning by using the tools.”

CRE staff traveled to Meriden and Augusta to connect with educators like Herrin looking to demystify AI. At the events, district superintendents and teachers discussed their unique goals, challenges and strategies to reimagine education. The events also offered time for reflection and cross-district collaboration.

“We are preparing our kids for their future and not for our current present,” said Dan Wessel, superintendent of Oskaloosa Public Schools. “Kids tomorrow aren’t going to be the same as they are today.”

Brad Kempf, superintendent of the Jefferson County North school district, emphasized the importance of AI in preparing students and teachers for the future of education.

“I think in public education, we need something to ignite our instruction and to ignite our kids to be better prepared for the future,” Kempf said. “I think an AI tool for the teachers is just as important as for the kids to save time, meet all kids’ needs and provide them with varied experiences within education.”

CRE will continue to connect with districts through ongoing coaching, resources and personalized support after the events. In September, educators will reconvene to hone in on what they want to accomplish together.

“Our goal is to use AI as a lens to help schools think through how we personalize education,” said Bart Swartz, director of CRE. “When we do personalize education, the way we teach will look different, but we’ll unlock new possibilities for students and their teachers.”

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https://ku.edu/distinction

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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Matching skills with jobs in mutual fund industry leads to higher risk-adjusted performance, study finds

 

LAWRENCE — “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match”: As the lyrics to the classic musical emphasizes, finding the right match is a key goal for most people. Businesses are no different. And when the skills of an employee don’t fit the parameters of the job, both parties can’t operate at their highest level of productivity.

“When employees start their careers, the jobs or positions that best match their skills are unknown to both the employees and employers,” said Gjergji Cici, the Koch Professor in Business Economics at the University of Kansas.

“By having the employees try out different jobs, both parties gradually learn about the employees’ skill profile, and at the end of this learning-by-trying process, the employees arrive at jobs that best match their skills.”

Cici explores this topic in his new paper titled “Finding your calling: Matching skills with jobs in the mutual fund industry.” Exploiting unique features of the mutual fund industry, the researchers identified instances when this matching happens for fund managers and then studied the consequences. The article appears in Management Science.

Co-written by Mario Hendriock and Alexander Kempf of the University of Cologne, Germany, the paper finds that when fund managers are matched, they deliver a significantly higher risk-adjusted performance. Companies use this information to maximize value by increasing assets under the management of these managers and by collecting higher fees from these funds.

“A mutual fund manager invests in accordance with a pre-specified style, which we think of as equivalent to a job. Each investment style largely determines the investment universe and, consequently, the skills needed to invest in that universe,” he said.

For example, the most relevant skills of a fund manager operating under a value style mandate revolve around understanding the value of assets in place and the cash-flow generating capabilities of companies in the near future. Whereas a growth manager’s skills revolve around understanding the growth opportunities that the company has, which take a longer time to realize. A growth manager, as compared to a value manager, is equipped to assess outcomes with a higher level of uncertainty.

“While managers can learn style-specific skills through training, some of these skills are arguably of an innate nature given what we know from previous research,” he said. “We conclude that a fund manager is ‘matched’ to an investment style when, after trying different investment styles, the manager returns to a previously tried style.”

To gather this information, Cici’s team identified when such managers are matched to investment styles and then examined how their performance changed after that point in time — in comparison to other managers from the same investment firm who were not matched to styles. They also used a similar approach to examine how firms exploit the knowledge that a particular fund manager was now matched and operating at a higher level of productivity.

“What surprised me most was the realization that fund managers do not know what style best suits them at the onset of their careers,” Cici said.

That realization came into focus when Cici read David Epstein’s 2019 book titled “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,” which describes how some of the top musicians experimented with different instruments or music styles before finding the one that best fit their talent, after which point they excelled.

“Similarly, some of the best athletes experimented with different sports until they found the sport they were best at,” he said. “All these examples have a common theme: discovering what individuals are good at is not clear from the beginning and requires trial and error, which, of course, takes some time.”

Could companies in non-financial-based industries use these same strategies to match employees’ skills with jobs that best fit those skills?

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Non-financial firms could rely on a similar learning-by-trying process to boost productivity of their employees. The caveat is that this process might be easier to formalize in larger firms, where the different types of jobs are more clearly defined or where there are many divisions with clearly defined functional boundaries.”

A native of Albania who is in his eighth year at KU, Cici researches the behavior and incentives of professional money managers. His past work involving mutual funds studies the human capital of these managers and how investment companies utilize it and fund investors benefit from it.

“I would encourage CEOs to create organizational structures or processes that provide more opportunities for their employees to find the roles or tasks within the organization that best match their employees’ skills,” Cici said.

“For example, Fidelity, one of the largest mutual fund companies in the U.S., has a formal rotational program, allowing their analysts or junior portfolio managers to rotate through different sector funds. This provides training opportunities for their junior portfolio managers but also a chance for them to find a style that best matches their skills. Perhaps more companies could use such programs.”

 

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KU News Service

1450 Jayhawk Blvd.

Lawrence KS 66045

[email protected]

https://www.news.ku.edu

 

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

 

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

KU News: Art historian brings to light Korean Buddhist temple design, decoration

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Guest Columnist
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From the Office of Public Affairs | https://www.news.ku.edu

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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
Art historian brings to light Korean Buddhist temple design, decoration

LAWRENCE — Eighteenth-century Buddhist monks in the Korean countryside took advantage of the artistic freedom that distance from the capital granted them to create immersive temple environments that elevated the spiritual lives of worshippers.

Maya Stiller, associate professor in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas, focuses on one detail of this — the roof-supporting brackets and their artistic adornment — in her latest article, “Carpenter-Monks as Crafters of Chosŏn Architecture: Bridging Sacred and Secular Spaces,” in the Journal of Korean Religions.

She said the piece could be considered a first draft of a chapter of her forthcoming book project on Chosŏn Buddhist temple art and architecture more broadly.

“This is going to really break ground on a new topic,” Stiller said. “Because my work explores temple architecture and mural painting through a highly interdisciplinary lens, I draw not only on art and architectural history but also on Buddhist poetry, royal court records and even performance traditions like ritual music and theater. By bringing these diverse sources together, I look at how temple spaces were not just religious but cultural centers that reflected the visual, literary and spiritual life of their communities.”

Stiller said that, like their contemporaries in Europe during Baroque or Rococo periods, Korean Buddhist artisan-monks believed that, when it came to worship structures, more is more, not less. Secular architecture in realms controlled by the royal court tended to be austere, influenced by Confucian notions of modesty. Not so Buddhist architecture out in the provinces.

“This is an area that scholars in Buddhist studies haven’t really explored,” Stiller said. “Their focus tends to stay on the religious side of things. My work expands that scope by examining how religious and secular architecture intersected. I have found that there was a significant amount of overlap and interaction between the two, but there are also some key differences, and in this article, I am bringing those relationships to light.”

Stiller said, “As long as it didn’t pose a threat to royal authority, the carpenter-monks working in the provinces had a great deal of freedom. They could build whatever they wanted and how they wanted it, as long as they had the materials and funding. And they really made use of that freedom. By the late 18th into the 19th century, temple architecture becomes incredibly vibrant and decorative. You start seeing elaborate bracket arms with intricate carvings of lotus flowers, dragons and phoenixes. It’s full of movement and life.

“When I was doing fieldwork, I was just stunned by the energy of these places. The royal palaces are impressive in scale, but the intensity and vibrancy you feel inside a Buddhist temple hall is something else entirely.”

Imagine, she said, being a peasant in 18th century Korea.

“You share a small, thatched-roof hut with three generations of your family, scraping by on just enough rice, beans, some vegetables, maybe an egg or two, and, if you’re lucky, a bit of meat once or twice a year,” Stiller said. “And then you visit the temple, and it is the complete opposite of your daily life. The space is expansive, and roof-tiled buildings with their tall ceilings feel majestic, bursting with color and filled with sacred images like bronze statues that shine like gold. Maybe you attend a ceremony, and the monks begin to play their drums, cymbals and bells, and music fills the space. It becomes kind of a spiritual cleansing and a moment of emotional release, a real escape from the weight of everyday survival.”

 

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KU News Service

1450 Jayhawk Blvd.

Lawrence KS 66045

[email protected]

https://www.news.ku.edu

 

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

 

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

Kansas scientists put AI to work in the fight to save the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie

By
Anita Stuckey
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Wildflowers bloom on a grassland near Manhattan, the Konza Prairie Biological Station. Some trees can be seen in the distance. Keeping trees and shrubs at bay is part of prairie conservation.

Trees and shrubs are invading prairies, hurting the wildlife and making it harder to ranch. Yet it’s hard to know the full extent of the problem, so Kansas State University found a way to map it out on the cheap.

Kansas State University scientists are enlisting the help of artificial intelligence in the effort to conserve what’s left of North America’s shrinking grasslands.

Zak Ratajczak, an assistant professor and grassland biologist, says K-State scientists have trained a computer model to map in detail different kinds of woody vegetation affecting prairies, such as the aggressively spreading evergreens called eastern red cedars.

“You have to give it lots of samples,” Ratajczak said. “Then it figures out what the general characteristics are of eastern red cedar based on height and how it absorbs and reflects different types of light back to the camera.”

The K-State team uses high-resolution imagery and data captured by airplanes and feeds it into the model, which can distinguish between deciduous trees, shrubs and eastern red cedars.

They used open-source machine learning and publicly available aerial data. Ratajczak and graduate student Brynn Noble laid out the project in the July issue of the journal Remote Sensing.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation use planes to gather detailed data that they then make available for free to the public.

The National Science Foundation plane has camera equipment that takes in 1,000 wavelengths of light. It also sweeps the grassland at the Konza Prairie Biological Station with lasers in thousands of frequencies that bounce off the ground and return to the plane’s sensor. This allows K-State to build a three-dimensional map of the vegetation.

The Konza station is an 8,600-acre tallgrass property near Manhattan used for long-term research.

“ We visited the (National Science Foundation) plane that gathers the data and it’s really impressive,” Ratajczak said. “They do a lot of the hard steps and then we get all this data for free.”

K-State scientists built their model using the free coding language R, frequently used by scientists for data analysis. They trained it by giving it many aerial images of each type of vegetation.

The scientists then had the model try to identify further images on its own, and they double-checked whether the model was interpreting the images correctly. The model gave the right answer more than 97% of the time.

The K-State team has focused so far on the Konza property. But it hopes to expand the work — mapping out the prevalence of deciduous trees, eastern red cedars and shrubs across the Flint Hills tallgrass region.

This would help them see the full extent of the problem.

For decades, woody plants have been spreading across the Great Plains, to the point that they are transforming grassland into woodland and shrubland. Scientists in Oklahoma have dubbed the phenomenon the Green Glacier.

Common invaders in the Flint Hills include eastern red cedars, wild plum, roughleaf dogwood and smooth sumac. (These last three are shrubs or thickets.)

The Green Glacier is fueled by a host of human changes to the Great Plains since European colonization of North America.

A few examples include planting millions of trees in grasslands since that time and severely reducing the application of fire that Native Americans had long used to support grasslands.

Additionally, the realities of modern-day landownership pose a challenge. The continent’s remaining grasslands are divided among many different landowners with varying priorities for how to use the land and varying capacities for maintaining it.

Another key change is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. This helps woody plants grow faster on prairies, shading out grasses around them and surviving prescribed burns.

Mapping woody plants in great detail could help pinpoint how much forage for cattle and bison is lost each year to this transformation.

Already, scientists have estimated that the Flint Hills would grow about a billion more pounds of grass annually if not for trees and shrubs overtaking so much space.

K-State’s use of machine learning could also help researchers better track the relationship between this habitat transformation and declining grassland bird species, such as grasshopper sparrows and eastern meadowlarks.

Those species disappear from areas of grassland once low levels of shrubs and trees have invaded.

Eventually, K-State scientists hope that their advancements in mapping out woody plants with AI will help conserve swaths of grassland currently free of woody plants but likely to face that threat in coming years.

“One of the things we are thinking about using this for is early detection and intervention,” he said.

Nearly one-third of North America was once grassland. More than half of it disappeared for development such as row crops, cities and suburbs. And for tallgrass prairie — the kind of grassland in the Flint Hills — the statistics are even worse. Scientists estimate that less than 5% of the continent’s tallgrass remains.

The Flint Hills is the biggest remaining stretch of tallgrass prairie. That’s another reason for the urgency to deal with shrubs and trees there.

Some parts of the Flint Hills are already awash in these plants, but other areas still have a chance to proactively hold the hardest-to-control woody species at bay.

“ If you can catch encroachment (the spread of woody plants) when it’s in the early stages,” Ratajczak said, “it’s potentially easier to either halt or reverse using prescribed fire.”

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.

The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.

Kansas News Service ksnewsservice.org.

Are you an Old Fisherman…Take the Test

By
Steve Gilliland
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Well, yet another birthday has come-and-gone. It seems that since I’ve turned 70, my “check engine light” has come on and refuses to go out. It flickers on-and-off occasionally, but never goes completely off. Don’t get me wrong, at 74, I’m blessed more than many, and I praise God for that, but it seems like I daily feel like the proverbial “old fisherman,” and I’ve devised a questionnaire so you can see if you too fit into that category. So take the test;

You’re probably an old fisherman if you still smell like Ben Gay even after you’ve cleaned your fish.

If you waste countless hours of prime fishing time reeling and casting, reeling and casting, because you can’t remember whether or not you just re-baited your hook, you’re probably an old fisherman.

If, after reaching quickly under the boat seat for the dip net, you’ve found yourself holding your cane instead, you’re probably an old fisherman.

If you have ever started to hold the line between your teeth only to discover you’ve left your teeth at home at home, you’re probably an old fisherman.

If removing that occasional fishbone from your teeth can now be accomplished by removing your teeth and tapping them on the table, you just might be an old fisherman.

If you’re shore lunch now includes a tall, cool thermos of Metamucil and a box of prunes, you’re probably an old fisherman.

If your fishing buddies are now more than happy to take you along to their secret “honey holes” because they are confident you’ll never remember where you were anyway, you’re probably an old fisherman.

You’re probably an old fisherman if your wife now begs to go fishing with you because she’s afraid you’ll forget your way back home (you should feel lucky she wants you back home).

You’re probably an old fisherman if your favorite fishing chair is now one of those fancy walkers with a seat on it, and you are relegated to fishing from the boat dock because that’s the only place level enough to park it, or if you recently removed a seat from your boat to make room for your walker.

You just might be an old fisherman, if to you, the letters GPS mean Gotta’ Pee Soon

It’s easy for anyone to drive off with their coffee cup sitting on the roof or the bumper of the pickup, but if you have gotten to the lake and turned around to back your boat down the boat ramp only to discover the boat was still parked in the driveway at home, you’re an old fisherman.

And finally, I’m sure you’re an old fisherman if your eyesight has gotten so dim that you now haul home all the carp you catch because you mistake them for trophy bass…Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors!

Steve can be contacted by email at [email protected].

New wheat hybrids are on the horizon and Kansas farmers are among the first to test them

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Guest Columnist
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Kansas is an important “breadbasket” state because of its massive wheat production, but in recent years that’s been changing. With poor profits and drier climates, wheat has been harder to manage. New innovations could rejuvenate the economy and production of the wheat state.

It was 1874 when a large influx of Russian immigrants settled in Kansas bringing with them a hard red variety of wheat.

This wheat variety grew well in the harsh summers and dry winters.

Hard red winter wheat swallowed the Plains, and when you drive across Kansas in June you see it turn the land gold. Kansas has even been known in the past as the “breadbasket of the world.”

Today, Kansas embraces its wheat identity, and still is one of the top wheat producing states. But wheat acres have continued to trend downward, falling away to other crops like corn and sorghum.

For over a century, wheat hasn’t changed too much from when it first took over. Other crops have been improved and hybridized. But scientists now think hybrid varieties will create a new wheat era.

Agronomist Logan Simon wipes his brow with a cloth as he walks through test plots used to experiment with corn, cotton and wheat just outside Garden City.

The success of Kansas agriculture relies on research like this.

“It gives us some greater optimism as we move into a potentially drier future,” Simon said.

Hybrid varieties can bring better bread to your stores, healthy livestock that you eat and biofuels for your cars. And it is becoming increasingly crucial as climate change produces challenging environments for Kansas farmers.

These hybrids usually take good traits from different varieties of a crop and combine them to make a plant that’s healthier, hardier or produces more, even in harsh environments.

But it hasn’t been so easy with wheat. Scientists have racked their brains trying to make better wheat hybrids. The plant’s physiology makes hybridizing wheat difficult.

Katherine Frels has worked for years in wheat breeding at the University of Nebraska. She said people witness the scientific success of agriculture without even realizing it.

“Whatever crop they’re looking at as they go to church, go to the grocery store. Someone had to develop that variety,” Frels said.

Farmers have had innovations in corn hybrids since the 1930s. Soybeans followed shortly in the 1940s. Since corn was hybridized, farmers’ yields have increased about 700%, going from 26 bushels per acre to 183 bushels.

But even with the advent of fertilizers and pesticides, wheat has barely doubled its yields in that same time.

With corn, to make hybrids simply cut off the tassel at the top which produces pollen and plant it with another variety to cross the two.

The problem is wheat pollinates itself, which has made creating hybrid varieties nearly impossible.

Frels has worked on a lot of potential solutions, like chemically sterilizing the plant. She said from their research, out of 1700 wheat hybrid variety trials, there is a yield increase on average.

Universities aren’t alone. Seed companies are also diving in as well, studying how to make enough hybrid wheat seeds so it’s consistently available.

Corteva is a global agriculture company that has recently announced a breakthrough with their wheat hybrids.

Jessie Alt is the lead wheat breeder at Corteva. Hybrids have consumed most of her career, and it’s been a challenge.

Back in 2018, after decades of research, scientists mapped out the genome of wheat. That allows people like Alt to find ways to stop wheat from pollinating itself and breed it to make unique hybrids.

“It has been the most exciting thing of my career,” Alt said. “Like, we can do this.”

Alt said combining different field tools such as drones and understanding genetics have allowed for more hybrid innovations on a larger scale.

What this breakthrough means for Kansas farmers is potentially 20% higher yields in water stressed environments, which will be critical as the Ogallala Aquifer runs dry and farmers switch to non-irrigated crops once their water pumps fail.

It will also help farmers transition more smoothly to limited irrigation, while still producing a profitable crop.

Wheat hybrids could use less water, fertilizer or herbicides, and result in a product with more fiber and protein.

But farmers will need to be able to see and feel the crop if they are going to take a chance on it.

“Kick the tires, if you will,” said Jason Gaeddert, a farmer from Buhler, Kansas.

Corteva used Kansas for 70% of their test plots, one of them being on Gaeddert’s land. He said that the hybrid wheat has looked good, and even produced higher yields. He wants to see how much better that wheat will handle dry times when the rains don’t come.

“If it can handle that stress better, then you’re going to clearly get a better yield or better quality product. Then, that becomes more profitable,” Gaeddert said.

Corteva hopes to roll out hybrid wheat on the markets in 2027. But there is a problem with wheat hybrids on the horizon. They will be pretty pricey, and in order to change agriculture, farmers have to actually use the seed.

Farmers are able to salvage wheat seed from harvest, saving some money the next planting season.

With hybrids, the seed won’t be reusable because the offspring won’t be the same as the parents. Can the hybrids make farmers enough money to justify the increased cost?

Gaeddert said he will gladly spend more money to make more money. Other farmers might feel the same.

Mike Krieghauser is an agronomist for Pioneer, a seed brand of Corteva. He works with farmers in northwest Kansas.

Despite the financial challenges for farmers, Krieghauser is optimistic they’ll adopt hybrid wheat.

“I mean, it’s wheat. It should be the easiest adopting hybrid thing that we’ve ever done in the history of agriculture,” he said.

Calen Moore covers western Kansas for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. You can email him at [email protected].

The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.

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