College of Liberal Arts

Research “Using Body-worn Camera Footage for Training and Continual Improvement in Constitutional Policing,” Summer 2022-present (Dr. Fokoue, PI) SRS #22112305 and “Machine Learning to Assess Staffing Ratios in (the Austin) Police Force” SRS#22112232, Spring 2022 - Fall 2022 (Dr. Nishant Malik).

Research on how the use of AI based technologies impacts regional economic growth and development.

Research studying the effect of algorithmic pricing on collusion in oligopoly markets.

Research related to use of Whisper AI to transcribe audio and video oral history interviews using the research computing cluster.

NSF-funded project on the history of data entry investigates labor implications from automation technologies that speak to labor changes expected from today's AI technologies. 

Research exploring current accounts of agential guidance in the cognitive neurosciences and philosophy that are typically presupposed or explicitly embraced by AI models of agency, including a paper “Agential Guidance and the Dynamic Hierarchical Model of Intentions” that was delivered at the Southern Society For Philosophy and Psychology.

Research on the moral implications of building AI. Co-authored a book that takes an evolutionary approach to the “value-alignment” problem in AI (e.g., how to align the motivational goals of AI with the interests of humans and other moral rights holders).

Research and work critically analyzing what it means to be human in light of technological advances, including AI; ethics and legality of AI-infused surveillance that emphasize facial recognition technology; and ethics of designing robots and chatbots with anthropomorphic features. Member of the Institute for Defense Analysis’s Ethical, Legal, and Social/Societal (ELSI) Working Group contributing to DARPA-funded projects related to AI ethics. Author of several op-eds on AI ethics for media like the Boston Globe.

Research interests focus on linguistic sensing and language-inclusive sensing with text, speech, and multimodal human data, especially at the nexus of affective computing and human-centered AI, including interactive and resource-efficient machine learning.

AWARE-AI NRT, Aug 2021-Present.

Work in social robotics and understanding the philosophical, cultural, and political implications of advanced sex dolls (some with AI), how they change human behaviors, and their increasing implications in public and private spaces.

Collaborating with Action for a Better Community with support from an NSF Eager Grant on AI and machine learning applications for the nonprofit community, with a focus on developing an app for handheld devices that will enable neighborhood residents to co-produce knowledge and gather data that can be used in assessing community needs.

Research regarding AI’s influence on how biologists and biology trainees (students and technicians) learn to identify and understand study organisms.