Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English and Quantitative Methods Lauren Klein will officially inaugurate the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI (AIAI) network today, continuing Emory University’s expanding artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.
The Mellon Foundation granted Emory $1.3 million to form AIAI in a joint venture with Clark Atlanta University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the DataedX Group.
Klein, who is hosting a kickoff event today for the new program, said that each of these universities brings something important to the table for AIAI, such as Emory’s liberal arts foundation, Georgia’s Tech’s engineering expertise and Clark Atlanta’s knowledge as a historically Black university.
“We’re hoping to create opportunities for our courses to cross-pollinate,” Klein said.
As a three-year project, Klein said AIAI is only in its beginning stages. The network is interested in how AI can help combat racial and civil justice issues. With a “rich history” of social justice and one of the highest populations of Black people in the country, Klein said Atlanta is “well-positioned” to counteract the biases that come out of AI, such as how AI is used more frequently to police minority neighborhoods than in predominately-white residential areas or how facial recognition software typically recognizes lighter skin more accurately.
The AI Center for Learning, which is located in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, hosts a ribbon cutting ceremony on Sept. 19. Courtesy of Emory University
AI.Humanity, Center for Artificial Intelligence Learning
The Center for Artificial Intelligence Learning held its opening ceremony on Sept. 19 and is at the forefront of the University’s AI.Humanity initiative, according to Center for AI Learning Senior Program Coordinator Tommy Ottolin.
Ottolin, who graduated from Georgia Tech with a master’s degree in human computer interaction last May before joining the Emory community, is in charge of helping students and faculty integrate AI into their research projects.
“The University is starting to feel a little bit more intrigued as to what we’re doing over here in the Woodruff Library,” Ottolin said.
Ottin said that the AI Center for Learning will help fulfill the center’s goal of promoting AI education. He hopes students taking AI courses will help work on projects facilitated through the center.
“Anybody can start to dabble with these things in this kind of protected educational environment before y’all really graduate and enter into this real world where everyone’s talking about AI,” Ottolin said. “If you get to say, ‘I worked on these two AI projects firsthand at Emory,’ you’ll already kind of be ahead of the pack, since I think everyone recruiter-wise is interested in those who have AI experience right now.”
Department Chair Clifford Carrubba believes the center will attract members from across the Emory community and create new learning and research methods.
“You need a space that’s going to build community, that’s going to help the people in biomedical informatics talk to the people in quantitative theory and methods and to talk to the people in computer science and talk to the people in business law,” Carubba said. “The center is providing a venue that’s bringing these people together, starting to build community, in order to start creating some really generative new research that brings our expertise across campus together and in novel ways.”
Odin plans to improve AI literacy with workshops and different lectures at the center. Carruba added that he hopes introducing AI to Emory will improve institutional operations, from the way basic memos are distributed to how professors teach students.
“Developing that literacy will both help us take advantage of all the opportunities this technology is going to provide and also help us avoid pitfalls that might otherwise arise if we aren’t aware and actively engaged with the new technology,” Carrubba said.
Carrubba also stressed that the University’s AI initiative is further along than most of the Emory community is aware of due to investments that have been made across campus in the past, specifically in the development of the biomedical informatics department in the Emory School of Medicine, as well as the computer science and quantitative theory and methods departments.
Emory is also attempting to integrate AI into other departments through AI.Humanity, according to Klein.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is facilitate truly interdisciplinary … research teams where you have people from all of these disciplines coming together as equal partners,” Klein said.
Emory is making one of the most “aggressive” and “significant” investments in AI, through the center across all of academia, according to Carrubba.
“The AI.Humanity initiative … is really about bringing this technology and infusing it throughout the University in a way that will help us achieve important societal goals,” Carrubba said. “We’re looking to use this technology to answer and develop next-generation medical tools and the ability to answer and provide guidance in important public health questions.”
Lance Waller, a professor in the Rollins School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and a member of the AI.Humanity Advisory Group, sees AI as a way to improve medical technologies. Waller the example of AI can utilizing data from different medical devices to help doctors and nurses decide on treatments.
In the future, Waller sees AI and medicine being more interconnected at all levels of medical treatment.
“Whether it’s just cleaning up the text of a report or if it’s recommending doses for a treatment, I think we’ll see more and more of it,” Waller said. “But one of the things we’re starting to recognize is that it’s not just yes AI or no AI. There’s AI embedded in little pieces along the way and trying to make sure those all work well together is sort of a systems approach that is important to take.”
According to Waller, AI.Humanity allows for a lot of collaboration between different departments and ensures that AI at Emory is not “siloed” off.
Waller said that the goal of AI.Humanity is figuring out how to apply AI to all aspects of life. This is why the AI.Humanity seems so broad, according to Waller. The initiative is attempting to help all different fields utilize AI at some level. Waller said that it is important that experts, in their own fields, use AI “Rather than an AI person saying, ‘Hey, I can do your field.’”
“The beauty of the AI.Humanity aspect is it’s placing that expertise and that kind of thinking all around the campus rather than putting it all in one place,” Waller said.
AI Minor
As of Aug. 1 Students were able to declare a minor in AI, and Department of Computer Science Chair Vaidy Sunderam believes that Emory’s future may hold an even larger AI curriculum. He explained that the University is now “contemplating” creating a major or joint major in AI.
The computer science department created three new classes for the AI minor, this semester saw the addition of “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” (CS 211) and CS: 312 “Computing, AI, Ethics and Society” (CS 312), while the university will off “Machine Learning Applications” (CS 323) next semester .
Currently, Sunderam said that seven students have enrolled in the AI minor with another half-dozen inquiries — a number he expects to increase next semester, when first-year students can declare majors and minors. Sunderam said he anticipates to see hundreds of students enroll in the minor in the next few years.
Suderam stressed that the AI minor is for all students, regardless of their interests or majors.
“Most people have this apprehension, ‘Oh, this is a technical field, it’s math and science, I’m not really doing that,’” Suderam said. “That’s exactly what we want to overcome.”
Spencer Friedland (26C) is from Long Island, New York and is the Emory Wheel's Managing News Editor. He is a Philosophy, Politics and Law major and has a secondary major in Film. Spencer is also a part of the Franklin Fellows program at Emory.
