PSU Cmpsc 497 - Artificial Intelligence, Humans, and Society Spring 2025
Mon & Wed 2:30-3:45pm, 012 Walker
Instructor: Prof. Chris Dancy
Office: 363 Leonhard
Email: cld5070@psu.edu Phone: 814.863.1001
Office Hours (Prof. Dancy): Mon 10:00am-11:00am (office or virtual), Thursday 10:30pm-12:30pm (virtual) - You can make an appt using starfish or just stop by (virtual on in-person dependingo on the day) if the slot is open (if you need a guaranteed individual time slot, make an appt!)
Office Hours (TA, Edward Hsu): Tuesday 10:00am-11:00am (virtual), Thursday 1:00pm-2:00pm (in-person, 300 Building, Conference Room 8)
Code of Conduct
You have two primary responsibilities relating to code of conduct:
- Promote an inclusive, collaborative learning environment.
- Take action, even when others might not.
Engineering has a problematic history with respect to inclusion – in corporate environments, in our classrooms, and in the products we create. We strive to promote characteristics of transparency, equity, and justice that reflect what we hope Engineering fields become (and not necessarily what it has been or is now).
We reject behavior that strays into harassment, no matter how mild. Harassment here refers to offensive verbal or written comments in reference to disability, gender, physical appearance, race, religion, or sexual orientation; sexual images in public spaces; deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of class meetings, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.
If we feel someone is violating these principles (for example, with a joke that could be interpreted as sexist, racist, or exclusionary), it is our shared responsibility to speak up! If the behavior persists and I don’t know, send a private email to me to explain the situation. I will preserve your anonymity.
(Portions of this code of conduct are adapted from Prof. Evan Peck, as well as Prof. Lorena A. Barba)
Course Overview
How might we develop AI systems like ChatGPT for people and how do they even work? What does it mean that those systems we use might internally represnt worlds that are antogonistic and violent towards certain people? More generally, how can we build socioculturally, contextually competent AI systems? What do we need to represent and how do we represent it? How can we make those systems learn, and perceive in an environment given social environments filled with humans? How might we use the way people think to design these systems? How do societal and sociocultural structures provide foundations for the AI systems we create, deploy, and integrate?
In this course, I will give you some tools to provide some answers to these questions. You will have an opportunity to explore past answers to these questions and learn from them. You will have an opportunity to design and develop AI systems while also critically considering how those systems may interact with individuals and society.
Topics covered
Some topics we will cover over the course of this course (in no particular order)
Designing of (computational, AI System, Information processing system) artifacts
Cognitive Systems: How might we think about people from the perspective of cognitive science and build systems that emulate human information processing
Sociocultural Theory: What does it mean to be a (genre of the) Human, who is traditionally considered a part of those definitions, and what do those definitions mean for the way we develop AI systems?
Neural Networks: What are Neural Networks? How can I implement them?
- AI & Society: What does it mean to critically think about the ways in which AI systems are designed, developed, and deployed in our society, especially in the context of the above topics?