TRAILS Researchers Discuss How AI Will Change the Way We Live
Three researchers in the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) were recently interviewed for a podcast series on how artificial intelligence (AI) will change education, work, culture and creativity. The podcast episodes were produced by first-year students in the University of Maryland’s Design Cultures + Creativity Program who are researching and experimenting with generative AI.
University of Maryland’s Katie Shilton, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies, and Hal Daumé, a professor of computer science, were interviewed together for an episode that focused on what ethical and trustworthy AI looks like.
“The goal of many people who work on AI is automation, which basically means replace the person,” said Daumé, who is the director of TRAILS. “I’m excited about AI as a form of human expertise augmentation to help people do things they couldn’t do before.”
Shilton is also a Co-PI at TRAILS, where she leads the participatory design research thrust, which advocates for the deployment and use of AI in a way that aligns with the values and interests of diverse groups of people, particularly those that have been previously marginalized in the development process.
“Design for accessibility for so long has fallen on the margins, when there are so many people who need various sorts of accommodations for technologies,” she said. “We need to be thinking about what these tools are good for in an ethical way, not an instrumental one.”
Furong Huang, an assistant professor of computer science at UMD who specializes in trustworthy machine learning, discussed a myriad of topics including her recent Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Award, the importance of balancing ethics during this surge of AI, and internet deepfakes. Throughout her interview, Huang had a positive outlook on AI, describing herself as cautiously optimistic.
“The collaboration between a machine-learning model and an actual human expert together might make decision making much easier,” she said.
—Story by Maria Herd and Shaun Chornobroff, UMIACS communications group
