Chicago Tech Circle’s Data+AI course provides in-demand, real-world experience to students

Data and Artificial Intelligence skills have quickly become critical for college graduates—but where can students learn those skills, especially if they aren’t computer science or data science majors?

UIC’s Chicago Tech Circle is here to help. The new initiative, launched with support from Google.org and UIC’s computer science department, provides UIC undergrads with applied data and AI skills. The initiative is an outgrowth of Break Through Tech Chicago, which doubled the number of women and nonbinary students in computing between 2020 and 2025, and showcased UIC talent.

Chicago Tech Circle is offering a one-semester data and AI course, open to undergraduates who have completed at least 30 college credits. The course, CS 294 and cross-listed as FIN 294, Data+AI, will allow students from any major to develop data and AI skills applicable to their own areas of study and become more marketable.

The Data+AI course

The course was offered for the first time this fall, and students came from the colleges of business administration, engineering, and liberal arts and sciences. Clinical Professor Dale Reed and Senior Lecturer Baker Franke taught the inaugural course.

“The Data+AI course succeeded in providing both technical and non-technical students with AI knowledge and skills, culminating in a real-world project helping Sustainable Fitch automate extraction of environmental data buried in large pdf documents online,” Reed said. “One student indicated this was the best course they have had at UIC!”

The Data+AI course is also being offered for the Spring 2026 semester. Registration for this course will continue until January 23; details can be obtained by emailing chicagotechcircle@uic.edu.

The course familiarizes students with leveraging AI tools effectively and ethically; how to use data handling tools; use machine learning models; and explore workflow automation solutions. The course emphasizes the use of GenAI alongside human judgement, is not about programming, and deliberately builds professional skills to create organizational value.

The culmination of the course was a group project to assist Sustainable Fitch with an automation task, gathering public sustainability and annual reports, collecting what is known as Scope 1 CO2 emissions data and creating an AI solution that automates this time consuming data extraction task. Then, the teams worked to figure out the optimal mix between human effort in verifying data and AI assistance with the task.

Student teams presented their findings in front of a panel of judges, which included advocates from Sustainable Fitch, Google, and UIC.  Two teams won the challenge, “Witch for Fitch” and “Im[possible].”

Phung (Victoria) Vuong, a mathematics and computer science major who will graduate this semester, was on one of the winning teams, Im[possible], along with Karima Ahmed, also a mathematics and computer science major, Minh Nguyet Phẩm, a finance major, and Adnan Khatri, an information and decision sciences major.

Vuong said she learned that while AI can speed up a procedure, it works best when the designer knows what an expected result should look like, what tests to run, edge cases, and what method is most likely to work. She also realized that AI cannot reliably produce the correct solution for deeper programs and can hallucinate an answer. She had ideas what she’d do differently if she had to do the project over.

“Next time, I would split the problem into even more subsets, and from those subsets I would add more targeted features so the system would be even better, like a real product, and handling more servers,” Vuong said.

The Witch for Fitch team included Nihar Desai, a double finance and information and decision sciences major, William Tanna, a finance major, Rana Abougoash, an information & decision sciences major, and Karol Flores, a mathematics and computer science major.

Desai found AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, extremely useful for coding.

“I initially found coding challenging, but AI made the learning process much more accessible,” Desai said. “In particular, Gemini helped me understand code logic and corrections, which significantly improved my learning experience.”

Like Vuong, Desai learned AI isn’t always reliable. If he were to start the project again, he would experiment with a wider range of AI tools, such as playground-style platforms that allow more flexibility and customization.

Preparing for the future

AI is changing workplaces at a breakneck speed. A January 14, 2026, piece in Forbes, What Employers Want: The Dual Mandate, shows that over half of all employers surveyed assess candidates’ AI fluency. But these companies are also seeking students with critical thinking, problem solving, time management skills, adaptability, and resilience.

Tanna, also part of the Witch for Fitch team, said he was well versed in AI before he took the class, but wanted to take a deeper dive. What he learned went beyond the use of the tools—and made use of the skills future employers are looking for.

“In the end, we had to present a product that we made from scratch, solving a real-world problem and then pitch it to real companies,” Tanna said. “After every project, the teams changed, so we had to adjust to various working environments and time scheduling, teamwork, and much more. Overall, the course was one of the most interesting and beneficial courses I’ve taken; you learn a lot.”