Spring 2026 OLLI Digital Catalog – under construction 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: ADVANCED (L204)

L – Information Technology

Prerequisite: Course on beginning AI, or equivalent experience. In this course we cover foundational artificial intelligence (AI) concepts, technical infrastructure, practical applications, and the societal implications of AI’s rapid emergence. Over five sessions, we explore in lecture and discussion: AI as industrial-scale upheaval (economics, energy, data centers, ecosystem, and an AI taxonomy); how large language models (LLMs) work, with demos of the concepts; advanced prompting, reasoning models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); multimodal AI, agents, emergent behavior with exercises; and jobs, sector impacts, governance, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and guided reflection. Please note that this is a course for discussing AI and not for using it.

This offering meets for a total of 5 session(s).

INSTRUCTORS: Andrea Westerinen, Jeff Westerinen

WESTERINEN, ANDREA — B.S., physics and mathematics; M.S., computer science. Software engineer and systems architect, with 45+ years’ experience. CTO of OntoInsights, LLC. Member Wilmington OLLI Council. Specialization in natural language processing, narrative analysis and knowledge engineering. (CA346, D217, D295, L204, L257, L258)

WESTERINEN, JEFF — Spent 33 years in the consumer electronics and computer industries, holding leadership roles at IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Currently, CEO of Ontoinsights, LLC, a small startup dedicated to advancing knowledge acquisition and understanding human narratives. (CA346, D295, L204, L257, L258)

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