Dog Photos, Football, and a Day Trip to NYC: What We Learned in BUAD 220

As the Spring 2025 semester concludes, BUAD 220: Emerging Technologies in Business has wrapped up its very first term. It has been a long journey to develop and teach this course, which was started almost two years ago. Throughout the Spring 2025 semester, the course provided students with a comprehensive understanding of cutting-edge technologies and their applications in the modern business landscape. Here are several key modules, each focusing on a specific emerging technology and its business implications:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML): Students explored how AI and ML algorithms can analyze large datasets to make predictive decisions, enhancing business strategies and operations.
• Large Language Models (LLMs) & Generative AI: We delved into advanced AI models capable of understanding and generating human-like text, highlighting their roles in customer service, content creation, and data analysis.
• Cloud Computing & Blockchain: Students learned about scalable, on-demand computing resources and secure, decentralized transaction management systems, emphasizing their transformative effects on business operations.

These modules aimed to equip students with both fundamental concepts and hands-on experiences on how emerging technologies can be leveraged in various business contexts. Our students will certainly highlight what they learned in their resumes.

Were there any fun activities in this course? Certainly, we emphasized experiential learning through a series of interactive activities:

• Utilizing Python, ML, and AI to generate Fibonacci numbers.
• Organizing dog photos using AI-driven classification techniques.
• Planning a day trip to New York City with the assistance of AI tools.
• Predicting football win probabilities to explore data analytics in sports.
• Implementing blockchain for student records without a registrar office.
• Hosting our own AI applications in cloud environments.

Our wonderful students impressed us when presenting their course projects. The three projects, AI for traffic management, AI for dietary recommendation, and AI for landscape scheduling, demonstrated that our students can exploit technologies for real-world business innovation. The course activities and projects enabled our students to develop critical thinking skills and adapt to the rapidly evolving business and technology landscape.

We couldn’t have achieved much of these without support from our department, advisors, and guest speakers. Specifically, we welcomed Jeff Abbott, Haseeb Qureshi, Yu Xia, Jeff Prosise, and Jay Eckles to discuss with our students on various aspects and industrial applications of emerging technologies. Their contributions provided students with valuable perspectives on how technological concepts intersect with business strategies, further enhancing their growing proficiency in navigating complex, tech-driven business environments.

As technology continues to advance, our Department of Business Analytics and Statistics remains committed to updating its curriculum to reflect the latest developments. This course will undergo further development over the summer, with an updated version set to be offered in Fall 2025.