Campus Technology Insider Podcast September 2021
Listen: Why AI Needs the Liberal Arts
00:13
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast! I'm Rhea Kelly, executive editor for Campus Technology, and your host.
Colby College in Maine is investing $30 million to create the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the first cross-disciplinary institute for AI at a liberal arts institution. Among its goals: to democratize AI, moving it beyond the realm of large universities and technology companies to transform teaching, learning and research in a wide variety of disciplines. Yet it's not just about how AI can inform the liberal arts, according to my guest Amanda Stent, inaugural director of the Davis Institute. It's also about how a liberal arts perspective can bring about a better understanding of whether, how, and in what ways the use of AI can benefit – or harm – our society. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about the most critical AI skills for students, the ethics behind AI algorithms and what you should ask yourself about the AI tools you allow into your home. Here's our chat.
Amanda, welcome to the podcast.
01:31
Amanda Stent: Thanks, I'm so happy to be here.
01:33
Kelly: So first, I thought maybe you could introduce yourself, share a little bit about your background.
01:39
Stent: Sure. So my name is Amanda Stent, and I am the incoming inaugural director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College. Before Colby, I worked at Bloomberg, Yahoo, AT&T Research and Stony Brook University. And I am very excited to be going back to academia. And I'm very excited about the potential that this institute has.
02:01
Kelly: Yeah, I understand that you have an extensive background in natural language processing. And where you were involved in developing the technology that led to the virtual assistant Siri, which I'm sure, you know, kind of puts right into context for a lot of people.
02:16
Stent: Yeah, that was a while ago. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, funded a large project called CALO, for cognitive assistant that learns and observes. It meant different things over time. And there were about 200 academics across the country who worked on that project, and I was one of them. I was a brand new baby assistant professor then. So subsequently, the integration team at Stanford Research Institute, who led the project, they took that and packaged it up as Siri.
02:46
Kelly: Interesting. So yes, Colby recently created the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and it is the first cross disciplinary institute for AI at a liberal arts college. So I just want to know, why is it important to study, to incorporate the study of AI in the liberal arts?
03:06
Stent: Yeah, so there are two answers that I would give. The first is that AI really touches all of us these days, at least especially in the United States. You get up in the morning, you interact with your cell phone, you're interacting with multiple AIs, you get in your car, you turn on the smart GPS, you're interacting with an AI, you get to work, you're interacting with an AI, you open a website, you're interacting with an AI, just throughout your day. And people maybe don't understand the actions that they can take to influence those AIs both positively and negatively, and how it affects us as humans and as a society. So really want to help people across many disciplines understand how it, how they can interact with AI, and how it can interact with them, and how they can affect it. And the second is that the liberal arts really are about questioning and understanding. And it's about time we did some questioning of AI and the way it's been developed, not just from a computer science perspective, which is my background, we, you know, build things, but from all sorts of different perspectives, question the whether, whether we should be building it, the how, how we should be building it, and what it's for, how it can affect us as cultures, as groups, as cities, as colleges.