Guest Speakers

Sunipa Dev is a research scientist at Google working on the Ethical AI team. With interests that span interpretability, robustness, transparency, and fairness of language technologies, Dr. Dev furthers the ideals of trustworthy and responsible AI in healthcare, sociology, and finance. Her work builds on the fundamentals of culturally aware and inclusive natural language processing and is interested in how we can measure fairness of language models and diminish harms.

Dr. Dev received her PhD from the School of Computing at the University of Utah and was an National Science Foundation Computing Innovation Fellow at UCLA.

Maia Hightower is Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Technology Officer at University of Chicago Medicine. She is also the CEO and co-founder of Equality AI, a startup that helps clinical teams achieve health equity through responsible AI and machine learning operations.

Dr. Hightower has an MD and a Masters of Public Health from the University of Rochester, and she has an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Hightower is a leader in establishing AI standards for healthcare, her work in this space is nationally and internationally own, and she chairs the National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award DEIA Task Force

Suresh Venkatasubramanian directs the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) with the Data Science Institute at Brown University, and is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. Suresh’s background is as a computer scientist and his current research interests lie in algorithmic fairness, and more generally the impact of automated decision-making systems in society. Suresh recently finished a stint in the Biden-Harris administration, where he served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  In that capacity, he helped co-author the Blueprint for an AI BIll of Rights. 

Rajive Ganguli is the Malcom McKinnon Endowed Professor of Mining Engineering at the Univeristy of Utah and Associate Dean of Assessment in the College of Mines and Earth Sciences.

He has three degrees in mining engineering, bachelor’s from Osmania University, India (1991), master’s from Virginia Tech (1995) and a PhD from the University of Kentucky (1999). In addition to an impressive resume of research at the intersections of AI and mining, including some on mine to mill type problems and mill simulation, Dr. Ganguli’s ai.sys group is part of an interdisciplinary team that is linking air quality to health and educational outcomes. Another effort involves developing natural language processing based machine learning tools to analyze textual mine safety data. His research group is the creator of the free analytic software, UteAnalytics, which helps non-coding, subject matter expert gain insights from their data using machine learning.

Rebekah Cummings is the director of the Digital Matters Lab at the University of Utah and a tenured librarian at the Marriott Library. She earned her Master’s of Library and Information Science at UCLA and has a bachelor’s in Philosophy from Cal State Long Beach. She was the Utah Library Association president where her efforts won the ULA the Hodges Award in Intellectual Freedom. She also recently won the “Torch of Freedom” award from ACLU Utah for her work with Let Utah Read to oppose book censorship and school library book bans in Utah.

Rebekah’s current research considers AI’s impacts on misinformation, disinformation, and censorship and explores the ways AI changes our information landscape.

Randy Dryer is the Presidential Honors Professor in the Honors college and a Professor of Law at the Quinney College of Law. He is a nationally recognized expert in media law, privacy and internet law. Professor Dryer has been listed in Best Lawyers in America since 1993, and was named a “Utah Top Lawyer” by Utah Business Magazine. Professor Dryer served as a trustee of the University of Utah for 17 years including 8 years as chair and vice chair. Professor Dryer teaches courses on technology and litigation, information privacy law, Social media and the courts, privacy in a digital age, and he co-taught, a very prescient praxis lab five years ago with Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian, (our second guest speaker). That Praxis Lab “When Machines Decide” was about Big Data, AI, and Algorithms.

John Mukum Mbaku is a Brady Presidential Distinguished professor of economics at Weber State University, where he is also a John S. Hinckley Fellow. In addition, he is a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institute in Washington DC. Professor Mbaku received his PhD in economics from the University of Georgia, his JD from the Quinney College of Law here at the University of Utah, a BS in Chemistry from Berry College, and an BA in French from Weber State. He also holds an International MBA from the University of South Carolina. I don’t know why he agreed to come to talk to us today, but I’m so glad he generously did agree to share some of his expertise with us. His research interests are in public choice, constitutional political economy, sustainable development, law and development, international human rights, intellectual property, rights of indigenous groups women and children, trade integration, and institutional reforms in Africa. He engages with community groups to help them understand issues like globalization, outsourcing, and immigration. He is the author of three books: Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences, and Cleanups, Governing the Nile River Basin: The Search for a New Legal Regime, and Protecting Minority Rights in African Countries: A Constitutional Political Economy Approach. Professor Mbaku’s work in economics and policy especially in Africa enriched our consideration of AI as it intersects with labor, the environment, and governance.

Tucker Hermans is an associate professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. There, Dr. Hermans directs the Utah Learning Lab for Manipulation Autonomy and is affiliated with the University of Utah Robotics Center. He was a postdoctoral scholar in Germany at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at TU Darmstadt and earned his PhD in Robotics from Georgia Tech. His research focuses on autonomous learning, planning, and perception for robot manipulation. He is particularly in enabling robots to autonomously discover and manipulate objects with which they have no previous knowledge or experience. He has won numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty award, and a Sloan Fellowship. 

is the Program Manager in the SCI-HUM initiative within the Scientific Computing Institute. He is also a PhD candidate in the Writing and Rhetoric Department at the University of Utah where he teaches courses like Critical Code Studies and Programming for Humanities. He obtained a BS in Computer Science (BS) from Weber State University, a BA in English from the University of Utah, an MS in Information Systems from the U and a GC in Business Analytics from the U. Professor Gordon has over thirty years of experience in the Information Systems Industry in various roles including programmer, systems administrator, software engineer, database administrator, data warehousing and data analytics engineer. His hands-on experience spans local, national, and international projects in commercial, non-profit and government environments.

Christopher Griffin is the Director of Empirical and Policy Research at the University of Arizona James E Rogers College of Law. He teaches Civil Procedure, Remedies, Employment Discrimination, and Empirical Methods in Law. Professor Griffin’s scholarship evaluates procedural and informational methods for increasing access to justice. He is also involved in evaluations of criminal pretrial risk assessments. He was the research Director of the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School from 2016 to 2018.

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology. His current work uses science fiction to reimagine the conquest of the Americas, and he’s also a member of the National Humanities Center’s Program in Responsible AI and has been thinking about the Enron corpus, natural language processing, and the role of fraud in technology and beyond.

Manish Parashar is Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah and a Presidential Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing. He recently completed a term as Office Director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, where he oversaw investments in national cyberinfrastructure. He also served as co-chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force. Manish is also leading the Responsible AI Initiative here at the University of Utah, which is very exciting to our Praxis Lab on Responsible AI.