Principal Investigator:
Minghui Hu studied structural engineering with computer-assisted analysis and design in Taiwan and earned his B.S. in 1989. Upon receiving his MS from Virginia Tech’s Science and Technology Studies graduate program, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his Ph.D. in History at UCLA. Hu was a computer programmer at a child psychiatrist lab in a UCLA hospital while pursuing a Ph.D. in History. Upon completing his dissertation in the History of Science program at UCLA in 2004, he moved to the University of Chicago as an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow. Hu joined the faculty of History at UCSC in 2005. Minghui Hu has published a monograph titled China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen (Washington 2015, the Chinese translation is forthcoming in 2023) and co-edited Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600-1950 (Cambria 2016) with Johan Elverskog. His articles have appeared in several academic journals, including The International History Review, Frontier of History in China, Twentieth-First Century, Xue Heng, and Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. He has completed a book manuscript titled Waiting for the Barbarians: A History of Geopolitics in Early Modern China (Cambria, 2024). Data mining and the field of digital humanities are the main focus of his future research. He will also continue to study the history of early modern China.
Participants:
Magy Seif El-Nasr is a professor and department chair of computational media at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She directs the Game User Interaction and Intelligence (GUII) Lab. Dr. Seif El-Nasr earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Computer Science in 2003. Her research focuses on two goals (a) developing automated tools and techniques for authoring, adapting, and personalizing virtual environments (e.g., interactive narrative, believable agents, and games), and (b) developing evidence-based methodologies to measure the effectiveness of game environments through the development of novel process mining and visual analytics systems. During her tenure, she worked in AI, data science, and HCI. She has explored the impact of AI technologies and their designs from a humanistic and social science perspective toward understanding how to design better AI systems that can be useful for users.
Max Tomba is professor and the chair of the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. He studied philosophy at the universities of Padua, Pisa, Würzburg, and Munich. His research interests encompass a wide range of subjects, such as political theory, critical theory, law, legal history, and the Marxist tradition. He will center his research on the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on societal constructs such as education, employment, and politics. A key area of interest for him is exploring how AI can alter our perception and understanding of reality. His work builds on Benjamin’s reflection on the Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility to explore how the new technique modifies not only experience but also the structures through which the experience of the real takes shape. The result is a multiplication of levels of reality that can have serious political implications.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is co-director (with Michael Mateas) of the Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS), a technical and cultural research group. Current EIS research explores ways that new AI models (e.g., LLMs) can be combined with a variety of traditional AI techniques to open new possibilities for domains ranging from narrative interpretation/generation to social simulation. Wardrip-Fruin is also an editor of the software studies book series from the MIT Press, which focuses on work that combines humanistic interpretation and critique with substantial engagement with technological specifics. His publications in this area include the monographs Expressive Processing (2009) and How Pac-Man Eats (2020), which have been featured in publications ranging from Game Studies and Digital Humanities Quarterly to Publisher’s Weekly and ACM Computing Reviews. Wardrip-Fruin’s combined technical/humanistic research expertise will aid in the formulation and execution of Center research priorities.
Pranav Anand is a professor of linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, where his research centrally focuses on the study of context-dependence in the semantics of natural language, including expressions of evaluativity, modality, narrative structure, temporality, and thought attribution. His work employs analytical frameworks from logic and philosophy of language, as well as experimental methods of psycholinguistics, and large-scale corpus analysis and machine learning methods from natural language processing. Two of his current projects expressly involve the future of work with large language models, like ChatGPT: one explores fine-tuning large language models for two linguistic research tasks, the design of complex psycholinguistic stimuli and human-in-the-loop linguistic annotation of multilingual web-scale datasets; another explores how co-writing with an LLM affects students’ development as independent critical thinkers. A program faculty of the Natural Language Processing M.S. program in Baskin School of Engineering and a co-PI on the NEH-funded Humanizing Technology Certificate Program in the Humanities Division, he teaches courses on language technology, programming and machine learning methodology for linguists, theoretical linguistics for computer scientists, and computational linguistics.
Matt Sparke is a Professor of Politics at the University of California Santa Cruz, and one of the founding directors of UCSC’s program in Global and Community Health. He currently serves as an editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Globalization and Health. He is the author of books on globalization and political theory, and has also published widely in journals and other books on global health politics, the geopolitics of globalization and political theories of citizenship and sub-citizenship under neoliberalism. His recent work has examined how responses to global neoliberalization take varied forms of political reaction, resistance and resilience, and he is particularly concerned with how philanthro-capitalist projects navigate between reactionary and revolutionary politics by fostering the development of resilient market subjects. At the same time, his new project addressing farmworker health vulnerabilities and responses amid climate change seeks to advance real resilience among local communities who suffer some of the worst risks tied to the planetary health crisis. His recent publications are listed at: https://campusdirectory.ucsc.
Lori Clinchard, is chair of the humanities department and faculty director of the California History Center at De Anza College. In 2006, she earned a Ph.D. in Humanities, with a concentration in Transformative Learning and Change, and an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology, with a concentration in Human and Organizational Transformation, from the California Institute of Integral Studies. As CHC Faculty Director, her focus is on digitizing five decades worth of oral history recordings, while working with current faculty and staff to gather new oral histories. Her research interests are creativity, consciousness, and the pedagogy of experiential learning. She is part of De Anza College’s exploratory GAIA group – the Generative Artificial Intelligence Alliance, and is a fellow at FHDA’s Mellon Foundation supported Center for Applied Humanities, through which she is developing an interview series entitled, “Staying Human(e) in the AI Era.” Beyond the practicalities of how best to use generative AI while minimizing the harms, she recognizes that the growth of generative AI is challenging our sense of what it means to be human. The interview series is focusing on the perspective and collective wisdom of artists, musicians, writers, poets, and philosophers as we transition into a world where AI, bioengineering and brain-machine interfaces may fundamentally change what it means to be human, and to be humane.
Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches classes on early modern Europe, the history of science and medicine, environmental history, and world history. He is the author of The Age of Intoxication (2019), which won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. Since January of 2021, he has been developing new pedagogical methods relating to generative AI’s use in classroom education by utilizing ChatGPT to simulate historical settings in history classes. He is a long-term collaborator with Taraaz, a non-profit organization at the intersection of technology and human rights, which has conducted human rights impact assessments and red teaming for OpenAI, among others. Breen’s second book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in 2024. He is currently beginning a new book project: “The Prehistory of AI: Disembodied Minds and Apocalyptic Technologies in the Age of Empires, 1630-1930,” a study of the intellectual and material conditions that made the concept of artificial intelligence possible in the three centuries before digital computing.
Associate Professor Zac Zimmer is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture, and technology, with a research focus on the infrastructure of technosystems. He is investigating the relationship between human creativity and intellectual property from a comparative and historical perspective, with a focus on the data used to train AI and ML models. He is part of UCSC’s Humanizing Technology certificate program.
Leilani H. Gilpin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the design and analysis of methods for autonomous systems to explain themselves. Her work has applications to robust decision-making, system debugging, and accountability. Her current work examines how generative models can be used in iterative XAI stress testing.
She holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, an M.S. in Computational and Mathematical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Mathematics (with honors), B.S. in Computer Science (with highest honors), and a music minor from UC San Diego. Outside of research, Leilani enjoys swimming, movies, cooking, hiking, and org-mode.
Mark Howard is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Politics and History of Consciousness departments at UC Santa Cruz. He previously studied philosophy at Macquarie University and International Relations Theory at the LSE, and prior to that worked as a technology management consultant in the financial services industry. Disciplinary interests include political economy, political and social theory, critical theory, and continental philosophy. His dissertation is a critical study of venture capital as a means, mode, practice and process of social reproduction and renewal. His primary concern with AI stems from current attempts (backed by venture capital) to win market dominance and monopoly over the AI space, and how commercial tools are being framing as a part of a socially necessary future. Also of interest is how proponents of AI tools are promoting complementary facilities to deal with social dislocation, such as a cryptocurrency-based Universal Basic Income to soften the blow of AI-induced “post-employment.”
Lucia Vitale is an interdisciplinary global health scholar who uses comparative methods to study the politics of primary healthcare access. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Politics Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a visiting research fellow at the Center for Migratory Observation and Social Development in the Caribbean (OBMICA) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. In the spring of 2022, Vitale was awarded a Fulbright for fieldwork associated with her dissertation entitled “The Borders of Health Citizenship: Inclusion and Exclusion along the Dominican-Haitian Border.” Vitale’s work spans many topics in global health, including AI’s role in future global health interventions. She is a participant in the UCSC research cluster Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and recently presented a lecture entitled “Artificial Intelligence and the Politics of Avoidance in Global Health” for the cluster.
David Munday
David Munday is an AI researcher at Google Research investigating novel applications of generative AI for personal agents supporting underserved mobility and sensory impaired populations.
David received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz where he studied microarchitecture and speculative memories and was a founding faculty member of the Baskin Engineering Corporate Senior Design program.
Xiao Li is a digital humanist at the humanities computing services of the Humanities Division. Her research interest is in digital humanities and Chinese diasporas to Americas with a focus on gender and medicine. She was the digital humanities specialist of Phillips Academy Andover, building an online archive “Chinese Students at Andover 1878-2000” to archive the Chinese students in the school’s history and exhibit rich and important education and migration history of the U.S. that shaped Chinese modernity, Sino-U.S. relations and history of Asians in America. Her current book project, a revision of her doctoral dissertation, focuses on Yamei Kin (1864-1934), the first Chinese woman who obtained a college degree and medical degree in the United States.
Man-Ning, Chan (Manning)
Manning is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at UCSC. After acquiring her first Ph.D. in comparative studies of world religions in Hong Kong, she continued her studies on early-modern Qing China by focusing on the politics of Chinese music and tradition-making. To experiment with a worldview that works away from the Eurocentric narrative, she designed and taught a course on the world history of Christian missions and missionaries in the summer of 2023. Built upon her AI training from the University of Pennsylvania’s Dream Lab, she plans to develop her world history course into a digital humanities project.
Jack is a first year PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering, researching under the tutelage of Dr. Leilani Gilpin, with whom Jack focuses on AI Explainability and Accountability. Jack is an activist, prison abolitionist, and radical feminist. Jack received their Bachelor’s of Science in Biomathematics and Scientific Computing from Florida State University, where Jack focused on computational neuroscience and machine learning as applied to suicide prevention. Jack is currently the Data Empowerment Lead for ProofMode, a photo-verification app which is a tool for fighting disinformation and empowering citizen journalists and scientists. Jack is also a member of Science for the People, a radical group of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist scientists.
Sarah Papazoglakis
Sarah Papazoglakis is Trust Strategist at Meta’s Reality Labs where she builds privacy and responsible innovation frameworks for emerging VR technologies and bridges the gap between AI research and consumer product use. Sarah draws from her humanities PhD to help product and engineering leaders imagine and define positive social impacts of future technologies and scope the requirements needed to build privacy- and trust-by-design into foundational product architectures.
Theresa Hice-Fromille
Theresa Hice-Fromille (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Geography at The Ohio State University with a PhD in Sociology and designated emphases in CRES and Feminist Studies from UC Santa Cruz. In 2022 she completed a summer THI public humanities fellowship with Meta’s Reality Labs where she co-developed a diverse speculative fictions archive that critically taxonomizes the technologies and futures portrayed in Afro-, Indigenous-, Asian-, and Latinx-futurist cultural productions. Throughout 2022 and 2023 she led presentations and equity workshops for developers that draw on insights garnered from this archive to inspire equitable and conscientious technological innovation. She is currently extending this work to include youth participatory action research (YPAR) and workshops for young people in the so-called “Silicon Heartland.”