Brown CS Blog

A new project (“Where are the data workers behind AI?”) from the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign is an investigative attempt to make the data annotation and labeling industry transparent.

 

 

In a new blog post, Emily Hong, who co-led the CNTR AISLE Legislation Lab with Dre Boyd-Weatherly, takes a moment to reflect on the lab’s journey of success, growth, and iteration thus far.

A recent Brown+Beyond event welcomed alums and friends to a discussion with two campus AI leaders, Michael Littman and Brenda Rubenstein.

Sam Dooman, a Brown CS alum who also studied music, works as the founding engineer at Down Dog, a company that develops apps for practicing fitness at home, including yoga, high-intensity interval training, and meditation.

Brown University doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar is the friend people turn to when they need to talk. 

“My family jokes that I’m the ‘therapist friend’ everyone calls when they have a problem,” Iftikhar said. 

Her capacity for caregiving has informed her research at Brown, where she is focused on exploring technology’s therapeutic strengths and weaknesses to find ways people can best use AI to support social and mental health. Her research has spotlighted humans’ inherent ability to offer and detect empathy, which is something that chatbots, text-based therapists and other artificial intelligence systems don’t do well, she said. 

The chatbots routinely violated core mental health ethics standards, underscoring the need for legal standards and oversight.

In a new article, The Brown Daily Herald talks to Brown CS faculty member Ellie Pavlick about Brown's new AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA), funded by a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study human-artificial intelligence interactions and mental health. 

Two new classes offered through Brown’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities add critical and historical context to deep questions surrounding artificial intelligence and large language models.

A new article from The Brown Daily Herald interviews Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman, who has just been appointed as Brown’s first Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, a newly established leadership position with a campus-wide charge to advance, in a responsible manner, Brown’s engagement with AI across its academic missions.

 

In another story from the latest issue of Conduit, our annual magazine, Brown CS doctoral student Jason Xinyu Liu shares how he develops intelligent robots that assist people by executing natural language instructions from humans autonomously and safely.