Faculty fellows develop a project, collaborate with colleagues across campus, and contribute to programming through workshops, presentations, and community engagement, and advances the King Center’s mission of embedding data and technology across the liberal arts.

Faculty fellows

Project: My project will explore how emerging technologies can support student learning while preserving the independent thinking and disciplinary judgment we want students to develop. I’ll use chemistry courses I teach as a testing ground for practical uses of AI in data analysis, visualization, and problem-solving, as well as immersive tools such as VR for abstract concepts. Through the fellowship, I also hope to engage faculty colleagues in considering how these approaches translate across disciplines and what responsible use of emerging technologies should look like in different fields.

Project: I plan to use my time as a King Center Fellow to work on key areas of my teaching and scholarship that connect with the larger goals of the King Center. I will be teaching two courses this semester (Geopolitics of AI and The Future of News) that centralize AI and technological changes, and I hope to leverage the knowledge of the community and the resources at the center to enhance key aspects of the course. Additionally, I am currently working on a research project that investigates the parasitic relationship between AI models/chatbots and news media. Even as they rely on both historical and news content from the news media for learning and training their models, AI Chatbots also siphon off traffic from news sites thus directly harming the bottom line of the news media. My project analyzes traffic data to sites as well as recent controversies (including the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI) to understand what the rise of AI chatbots as information intermediaries means for the future of news media.

Project: The fellowship year will help me work on my project, which is already underway, and also promote humanistic conversations about technology and AI. The project has two parts and a shared aim: to make the King Center a place where humanists and artists, not only data specialists, gather to think about what AI is doing to their fields. The first is AILA, the AI Language Assistant I have been building with Matt Kretchmar in Computer Science. We piloted it this spring in SPAN 211, as a Spanish-learning tool. The pilot showed that students use AI more carefully when the tool is tied to the course goals. It stopped being a shortcut and became part of the work. The pilot also convinced me that AILA does not need to be only a language tool. With some redesign, it could serve different courses across campus. The second part stems from my new role as Director of Digital Humanities. I want to build a Critical Making course where students make things with AI to think through hard questions. Moreover, I aim to bring together a group of colleagues willing to experiment with AI in their own courses and to discuss humanistic questions. I’d also like to initiate a series of open talks on privacy, ethical use, platform decay (enshittification), and the future AI might bring. Behind all of it lies an important question: how do we keep human judgment at the center of our use of AI?