Critical AI Today: A Multidisciplinary Panel

A Mathematician, a Librarian and a Language Teacher share their experiences reflecting on, explaining, researching, applying, and teaching advanced AI tech. Join us for a genuine interdisciplinary discussion on AI and Us.

This event is co-sponsored by the UB Institute for AI and Data Science.

E. Bruce Pitman is a Professor in the Department of Materials Design and Innovation. The author or co-author of more than 90 research articles, he has been a principal investigator or co-investigator on approximately $15M of research and equipment awards. An expert in mathematical modeling, for the last two decades he has been studying uncertainty quantification – techniques for understanding uncertainty in models of physical or biological systems, and how computing can account for these uncertainties.

Cynthia Tysick is Innovative Pedagogy and Creative Spaces Librarian at the UB. Her reserach interests include: Digital Identity, Information Literacy, UN SDGs, Digital Pedagogy, and Media Literacy. She is interested in the transition of high school students to first-year college undergraduates. Specifically, how well have they been prepared to use information sources for a successful undergraduate experience? Are incoming students information, media, and digital literate? What positive and negative roles has the Internet, social media, and tools like Wikipedia and Google had on students' ability to discern mis/dis-information? Can we measure their perceived, versus actual, critical multimodal literacy skills? Finally, what role does the library play in educating a global citizenry?

Melissa McCarron, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages, specializes in Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), Spanish for the Health Professions, proficiency-based language instruction, and community-engaged experiential learning. Her work underscores the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to language education and their potential to address complex societal issues, including social and structural determinants of health. More recently, McCarron has been working to develop Spanish-language pedagogical tools that harness AI to facilitate culturally competent communication across health professions.