Policymaking should be a society-wide effort, including elected officials, government employees, academics, business leaders, civil society groups and individuals. In theory, each of us should be able to participate.
Category: 4/ Fellow”s Projects
Aula Fellow Project
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Travailleurs du savoir, l’IA changera votre quotidien
Les professionnels et les travailleurs du savoir, en particulier ceux qui n’ont pas encore utilisé l’intelligence artificielle (IA), peuvent être enclins à avoir de fausses idées qui masquent l’ampleur des perturbations à venir.
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Unveiling AI Concerns for Sub-Saharan Africa and its Vulnerable Groups
In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), artificial intelligence is still in its early stages of adoption. To ensure that the already existing class imbalance in SSA communities does not hinder the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals, such as data security, safety, and equitable access to AI technologies, acceptable reliability measures must be put in place (as policies). This paper identifies some of the vulnerabilities in AI and adds a voice to the risks and ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI and its impact on SSA and its vulnerable groups. Our systematic literature review of related research between January 2014 and June 2024 shows the current state of AI adoption in SSA and the socio-political challenges that impact its development, revealing key concerns in data Governance, safety privacy, educational and skill gaps, socioeconomic impacts, and stakeholder influence on AI adoption in SSA. We propose a framework for designing data governance policies for the inclusive use of AI in SSA.
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Hello, World
Welcome to our blog. Our mission is to ensure that everyone can access the conversation on AI. This blog of our collected works reports on the science, tech, and governance of AI. The purpose is to empower our readers.
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Do They Really Care about Us? On the Limits of State Intervention
This paper examines the limits of state intervention through the relationship between freedom and equality, the rule of law and social justice, as well as through two highly contradictory concepts regarding the scope of government action – the concepts of minimal state and paternalistic state. Accordingly, we seek to identify a model capable of outlining the extent to which the state can intervene in the light of socially beneficial goals, but without compromising individual freedom. Since we cannot find such a model within the extreme positions of liberalism and socialism, this paper seeks to offer a satisfactory solution by mitigating some of the ideologically exclusive positions. It embraces Aristotle’s teaching about the middle as a virtue and proposes sophisticated neoliberalism as a potential alternative to the status quo. Still, as insisted, the government should never be allowed to assume uncontrollable powers and create conditions for collectivist doctrines that recognize no individual freedom.
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Book Review: Litigating Artificial Intelligence by Jesse Beatson, Gerold Chan, and Jill R. Presser
It is no longer news that artificial intelligence (AI) is being deployed across the board in the legal industry, although the extent of AI use varies by jurisdiction.
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Several presentations, including “Taking the Lead in SWE: An Asian Perspective.”
Dr. Bhaduri will be presenting at the Society of Women Engineers, with whom she is a Senator. Several events are online for interested persons. Dr. Bhaduri is an accomplished technologist and educator, as well as being excellent speaker and is appreciated for her wit, her precision, and her kindness.
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Artificial intelligence practices in everyday news production: The case of South Africa’s mainstream newsrooms
This article explores artificial intelligence (AI) uptake in selected South African mainstream newsrooms. It seeks to determine the extent to which AI has been adopted and how journalists and editors perceive its appropriation in newsmaking practices. To address these two broad aims, the study used in-depth interviews with journalists and editors. Our findings suggest a slow, varied but methodical uptake of AI practices in South Africa’s mainstream newsrooms. We deduced three uses of AI in these newsrooms. The first is what we call the holistic appropriation of AI. The second one is the exclusively technological appropriation of AI, and the last one is the task-specific appropriation of AI. This varied uptake of AI is taking place against a deep-seated skepticism with this technology.
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Using Science to Support and Develop Employees in the Tech Workforce—An Opportunity for Multidisciplinary Pursuits in Engineering Education
The majority of students who choose to major in engineering do so to become a part of the community of practice of professional engineers (Johri & Olds, 2011), meaning that they want to have adequate exposure to what a career as a professional engineer could potentially be as part of their college experience. However, according to Jonassen (2014), engineering graduates are not well trained to contribute to the workplace due to the complexities associated with engineering work. Stevens, Johri, and O’Connor (2014) described engineering work as that which involves complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions. Since developing the skills for innovation involves analysis of complex, ambiguous, ill-defined, real-world problems (Daly, Mosyjowski, & Seifert, 2014; Newell, 2010), students must have an opportunity to, at the very least, be exposed to multidisciplinary teams. This emphasis on the need for exposure to multi-disciplinary problem solving holds true not only for undergraduate engineers in training, but also for graduate students focused on engineering education.
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Work in progress: Coloring Outside the Lines-Exploring the Potential for Integrating Creative Evaluation in Engineering Education
Extant cultures within academic institutions that educate and train the next generations of STEM professionals tend to privilege long-held majority perspectives of knowing, thinking, and doing in science and engineering. To more intentionally recruit and include diverse groups of students into our educational programs, it is imperative that we develop and adopt unique pedagogical and assessment approaches that move beyond didactics, leverage experiential learning, and embrace a variety of student backgrounds and identities. In this paper, we demonstrate how visual methods-based assessments can serve as an impactful alternative to more traditional forms. We start by introducing three examples currently used in STEM curricula, and then by describing how these assessments promote autonomy and creativity as students make meaning of STEM and of themselves as STEM professionals. We conclude the description of each assessment example by identifying key considerations for STEM instructors when attempting to implement such assessments in their own contexts.
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Board 164: Engineering Interventions in My Science Classroom: What’s My Role?
This work in progress paper draws on data from year one of a multi-year project aimed at integrating engineering into middle-school science classes. The expectation that middle school teachers integrate engineering into their science curriculum may be challenging as engineering related content has not historically been part of teacher preparation. Particularly in rural areas, in service teacher training related to engineering may be absent or difficult to access due to proximity or financial or time costs. Therefore, it is important to develop effective professional development (PD) that works within the actual teaching context and makes few demands on teachers beyond their regular workload. In partnership with teachers and local industry workers in rural and Appalachian areas, the Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools (VT-PEERS) project developed extended classroom engineering activities for students that also served as teacher PD related to teaching engineering in locally relevant ways. As part of this work, a qualitative analysis was conducted to understand how teachers, from their perspectives, envisioned their role during the interventions. Data were collected prior to and after interventions (within an academic year) to further understand if, and if so, how, teacher perspectives of their role changed. Results reveal three initial roles; classroom manager, learner, helper, and unsure. The post intervention data revealed all teachers indicated being a “learner”.
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Board 192: Identifying and addressing the barriers to advancement for women in the engineering professoriate: A systematic review of literature
This work-in-progress paper shares ongoing findings from a mixed-methods systematic literature review that seeks to examine the retention of women in the engineering professoriate. We identified literature from EBSCOHost and Engineering Village that discussed women in the engineering professoriate in relation to either retention or persistence or both, as explicitly stated in their abstract. Following an initial review of 191 titles, 48 papers passed our inclusion criteria; further qualitative analysis of abstracts yielded 31 papers, which underwent a full paper review. Our ongoing findings suggest the following: a) research on the retention of women in engineering professoriate is being supported by grants and funding opportunities; b) the reviewed literature documented six barriers faced by women in the engineering professoriate: isolation of women faculty, work/life balance, inequitable distribution of service, underrepresentation of women faculty, implicit bias, and departmental resources; and c) although journal scholarship on this topic is not limited to popular engineering education publishing venues, conference scholarship are mainly from those popular in the field, such as the ASEE Annual Conference and the Frontiers in Education Conference. Future work will share the extent to which the reviewed literature discussed interventions to recruit or retain women in the engineering professoriate, and whether these interventions vary by the type of institution.