AI symposium today at UGA

A symposium on artificial intelligence is on tap for today at UGA, underway at 10 and lasting til 2 at the Georgia Center. Faculty from several academic disciplines across the University of Georgia are taking part.

From UGA…

Keynote Address (10AM)

Ian Bogost, Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor, Washington University in St. Louis.

Bio: Dr. Ian Bogost (pictured) is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also Professor and Director of Film & Media Studies and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. He has written 10 books, including Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to be a Thing, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, and (with Nick Montfort) Racing the Beam The Atari Video Computer System. He is co-director of Washington University’s Program in Public Scholarship and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where he covers technology, design, culture, and education. He is also an award-winning game designer and a founding partner at the independent game studio Persuasive Games LLC.

Title “Process Optimization Ate the University”

Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence and its associated methods have been around for a long time, but it wasn’t until a year ago that everyone discovered them, thanks to the public launch of ChatGPT last November. Almost immediately, speculation, excitement, and dread about the promise and peril of genAI overflowed. By some accounts, it marked the end of writers, translators, programmers, essays, college tests, and more. But a year hence, the truth of AI’s practical uses proves weirder and more complicated. As an example of wrestling with that complexity, this talk will cover the real and imagined uses of AI in universities, along with what those uses have revealed about a different but related problem: Our collective obsession with process optimization at the cost of imagination.

Lightning Talks (11:15AM-12:05, 12:20-1PM)

There will be two sessions of lightning talks, with a short break in-between.

(Abstracts)

• Ari Schlesinger (School of Computing): “Working Towards Human-Centered AI”
• He Li (School of Chemical, Materials and Biomedical Engineering): “Physics-informed machine learning for infectious disease forecasting”
• Tianming Liu (School of Computing): “When Brain-Inspired AI Meets Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)”
• Soheyla Amirian  (School of Computing): “AI-Powered Healthcare: A Computational Journey with the UGA AMIIE Lab”
• Hongyue Sun (Environmental, Civil, Agricultural and Mechanical Engineering): “Data Science Enabled Decision-making in Advanced Manufacturing and Personalized Safety”
• Gerald Kane (Terry College of Business): “Avoiding an Oppressive Future of Machine Learning: A Design Theory for Emancipatory Assistants”
• Neal Outland (Department of Psychology): “Harmonizing AI Integration in the US Economy: Bridging Diverse Stakeholder Perspectives for Seamless Transition”
• Guoyu Lu (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering) : “3D Structure Modeling and Assessment for Crops and Beyond”
• Lakshmish Ramaswamy (School of Computing): “Robust Environmental AI for Urban and Coastal Sustainability”

Interdisciplinary Panel Discussion (1-2 PM)

The hour-long panel will consist of our guest speaker and faculty from the UGA AI community.

Topic: “AI: Keeping Pace with Advances” Moderator: Jeanette Taylor (Vice Provost for Academic Affairs) Panelists:

• Ian Bogost (Guest Speaker)
• Tianming Liu (Professor, School of Computing)
• Youjin Kong (Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy)
• Megan Mittelstadt (Director, Center for Teaching and Learning)

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