A new Artificial Intelligence laboratory was announced as a joint venture between the University libraries and the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences April 17. According to Dean of Libraries Leo Lo, the new lab will help students and faculty across all schools and disciplines in the University to conduct research studies on AI. Lo said the lab will explore AI’s real-world applications, ethical considerations and how to begin developing a library of resources for future students researching both the technology itself and its broader societal effects.
In an interview with The Cavalier Daily, Lo discussed how the AI Literacy and Action Lab is intended to allow students to explore the complex ethical questions that accompany AI while developing practical skills for students and faculty in the field. He said he hopes the lab can serve as a platform for analyzing how AI affects society more broadly and for helping develop students as leaders in AI use.
According to Lo, the idea of creating an AI lab emerged when University Interim Provost Brie Gertler established a committee between the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost and the Center for Teaching Excellence on AI teaching and learning. The committee is composed of subcommittees designed to advise the Provost on AI in teaching, learning and research. According to Lo, one of his ambitions for the lab is to ensure it fulfills its purpose as an idea and data-generating hub.
Lo said the lab entered into a joint venture with the College because the College offers a wide range of areas of study, from science to literature, and the libraries serve as an effective medium for expanding the lab's reach beyond the College.
“I think [AI] is a problem that's quite universal and the library [is] a very natural hub to connect with everybody at the University,” Lo said. “The College [has its] own vision as well. They want to teach their students, but the ultimate goal for both of us as partners is to open it up for the rest of the University."
As part of its goal to collect data for the AI Committee, the lab is currently working on two projects — one with an economics course and another with an English course at the University — in which it will conduct pre- and post-tests on students to develop case studies on how AI has influenced their learning. According to Lo, this will provide the University with actionable data that has been lacking in the past regarding AI.
Lo said he believes the way students search for information is changing due to the expansions of AI. He said that society is moving away from a world where students search for sources to find specific information, and toward a world where students work in reverse — people now use AI to find the information they are looking for before searching for sources after the fact.
In the AI lab, Lo hopes AI will be able to develop and evolve with the libraries to adapt to the changing ways students find information. He also said he hopes to help students adapt to being presented with analyzed information that may contain errors and to work backward from that information to find its sources.
Lo also said that the lab could serve the purpose of advising the University on which AI licenses it may want to procure by testing the software on a smaller scale.
“We want to experiment with both tools and implementation. So if we get a request from students or faculty that says, ‘We are interested in trying this for this particular purpose, this particular project,’ we may be able to work with you … [to] provide that on a small scale [and] test it,” Lo said.
According to Lo, the lab also hopes to address questions of ethics and academic integrity in AI use and establish a relationship with the Honor Committee to work toward addressing those questions.
Lastly, Lo said he hopes the lab will create a library of AI resources for the Provost's AI committee and for faculty members conducting research. He plans to make the lab a collaborative space where students can build on each other's knowledge and create resources that do not yet exist because AI is relatively new.
“A lot of the time, when we have these AI centers or workshops, they are one-offs. People come in, they get something done, or they learn something and then [that's the end of the transaction],” Lo said. “We want to build assets, basically, so that other people can kind of build from that knowledge. That's what a library is. [We want to] have [a] library of these AI lessons and AI knowledge that other people can [learn] from.”
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