AI and Us:
Upcoming Events

Timnit will be joining us over zoom and we have a room in the new computer science building where participants can gather to watch and participate in person. Register to attend here and let us know if you will be in-person or online.

Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican highschool students. She has received a number of accolades including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME 100’s most influential people. She is currently writing a memoir + manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by Silicon Valley.

Presented by the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass and co-sponsored by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences AI and Us Series

Presenter: Christian Rojas, Resource Economics 

Facilitators: Colleen Kuusinen and Kirsten Helmer (CTL), and Dan Cannity (IT) 

Join us for a special session that brings together our GenAI Discussion Group and our SoTL Working Group – formed by faculty interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. This mashup creates a unique opportunity to explore AI integration through both practical implementation and scholarly inquiry.  

Guest presenter Christian Rojas’ talk combines research insights from a controlled GenAI teaching study with practical examples from an AI-centered undergraduate course. He will demonstrate how scaffolding, transparency, and structured student workflows support effective and ethical AI integration across assignments, projects, and presentations. Following the presentation, we’ll open the floor for attendees to ask questions and connect the lessons to their own teaching contexts.  

Whether you're actively researching your teaching, curious about bringing a more systematic lens to your pedagogical experiments with AI or simply want to learn from colleagues who are documenting their classroom innovations, this session offers a welcoming space to engage with evidence-based approaches to GenAI.  

The guest presenter will be on Zoom 11:30 am-12:30 pm. The session will then continue with discussion both in person and online. 

Co-facilitated by the Center for Teaching & Learning and IDEAS. 

We are calling for posters on topics related to computational social science, broadly defined, including but not limited to statistical and computational methods and their applications, social networks, text-as-data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and their impact on society and the future of work. The event is a great opportunity for students to get feedback on their work from faculty beyond their own classes and for the wider public to learn about the latest research in computational social sciences. 

Co-sponsored by the Computational Social Sciences Institute (CSSI) and the Data Analytics and Computational Social Science (DACSS) program.