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March 24 webinar explores artificial intelligence and the future of higher education
Media Contact
Ashlee Gardner
Panelists graphic

Emory artificial intelligence scholars (from left) Lauren Klein, Fei Liu, Matthew Sag and Phillip Wolff will discuss the medium- and long-term impact of artificial intelligence for pedagogy and higher education in a free webinar.

As ChatGPT and other natural language processing tools fueled by artificial intelligence enter the world stage, educators are looking at how these models will transform education in the classroom and beyond.

Join Emory AI scholars on Friday, March 24, from 12–1:30 p.m. as they discuss the medium- and long-term impact of artificial intelligence for pedagogy and higher education in a free webinar titled “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Higher Education,” part of the series “AI(squared): Academic Integrity, Artificial Intelligence and Rise of ChatGPT.”

Panelists will set the stage with a brief overview of artificial intelligence and how it works, along with an explanation of common terminology. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions during the last half of the event. 

Opening remarks will be given by Ravi V. Bellamkonda, Emory University’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. 

The panelists will include: 

  • Eric Weeks (Moderator), Director, Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, and Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs 
  • Lauren Klein, Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods, Emory College of Arts and Sciences 
  • Fei Liu, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Emory College of Arts and Sciences 
  • Matthew Sag, Professor of Law, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science, Emory Law 
  • Phillip Wolff, Professor of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences  

This webinar is sponsored by the Emory College Honor Council, the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence and AI.Humanity

Watch the webinar here.

Learn more about the panelists

Areas of Expertise: Digital Humanities, Data Justice, Data Studies, Quantitative Literary Studies 

Lauren Klein is a Winship Distinguished Research Professor and associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science and early American literature, with a focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. 

She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her work has appeared in leading humanities journals including PMLA, American Literature and American Quarterly; and at technical conferences including NACCL, EMNLP and IEEE VIS. Her research has been supported by grants from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation. 

Areas of Expertise: Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning, with special emphasis on Automatic Summarization 

Fei Liu is an associate professor of computer science at Emory University and co-director of the Natural Language Processing Group. Her research focuses on natural language processing and deep learning, with a particular interest in automatic summarization. With an excess of information readily available from various sources, it can be challenging for individuals to effectively process and comprehend all of this data in a timely manner. Liu is dedicated to exploring innovative ways to generate informative, concise and accurate summaries from large amounts of data. 
 
Liu held a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University and was a member of Noah's ARK. She also worked as a senior scientist at Bosch Research in Palo Alto, California. Liu received her PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas, supported by the Erik Jonsson Distinguished Research Fellowship, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Fudan University. Liu has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers in leading conferences and journals, and she regularly serves on the program committees of major international conferences. In 2015, she was selected for the "MIT Rising Stars in EECS" program, and her research has been recognized with several awards, including a Best Paper Award Finalist at WWW 2016, an Area Chair Favorite Paper at COLING 2018, an Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research award in 2020 and NSF's CAREER award in 2022. 

Areas of Expertise: Intellectual Property, Copyright, Technology and the Law, Artificial Intelligence, Empirical Legal Studies 

Matthew Sag is Professor of Law, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science at Emory University School of Law. Sag is an expert in copyright law and intellectual property. He is a leading U.S. authority on the fair use doctrine in copyright law and its implications for researchers in the fields of text data mining, machine learning and AI. 

He was born and educated in Australia and earned honors in Law at the Australian National University in Canberra and clerked for Justice Paul Finn at the Australian Federal Court. Sag practiced law in London as an associate at Arnold & Porter, and in Silicon Valley with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Prior to Emory, he taught at DePaul University and Loyola Chicago; he has also held visiting posts at Northwestern University, the University of Virginia and the University of Melbourne. 

Sag is currently working on several theoretical contributions to copyright law in relation to AI and machine learning and a series of empirical papers using text-mining and machine learning tools to study judicial behavior. His work has been published in leading journals such as Nature, and the law reviews of the University of California Berkeley, Georgetown, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Iowa and William & Mary, among others. His research has been widely cited in academic works, court submissions, judicial opinions and government reports. 

Areas of Expertise: Language Semantics, Machine Learning, Causal Reasoning, Future Thinking, Digital Phenotyping 

Phillip Wolff is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the director of the Concept Mining Lab. Wolff’s research focuses on the use of language semantics and machine learning to predict human thinking and mental health. Additional interests include causal reasoning, future thinking, intentionality and cross-linguistic semantics. He has co-edited several books, including one titled Words and the Mind, which examines the interface of language and thought across languages. He has given invited talks in countries including Singapore, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, The Netherlands, Italy and China. In addition to serving on several editorial boards, Wolff has served as director of the Linguistics Program at Emory, associate editor of the journal Cognitive Science and faculty at the 2007 Summer Institute of Linguistics at Stanford University. 


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