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:

1. Promote an inclusive, collaborative learning environment.
2. 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?

Course Outcomes

1. Students will be able to explain the fundamentals of some AI tools and techniques, and implement a technique/tool used to build AI/Complex Information Processing Systems.
2. Students will understand some of the sociocultural perspectives of AI implementation and use, and be able to think critically about these perspectives.
3. Students will understand what agents and models are, particularly as they apply to building AI/complex information processing systems.
4. Students will have sufficient opportunity to contribute to a scientific style report that accompanies a software implementation of a technique/algorithm/theory related to AI, including documentation for such artifacts.

Readings

There will be a wide variety of readings assigned throughout the semester. Some readings will be from a Sciences of the Articial), as well as other books avaialble for free. Many other readings will be journal articles made available online. You are expected to complete any assigned reading by the specified due date, be prepared to discuss the reading material in class, and pull the main takeaways from the reading such that you can be assessed. You will occasionally be required to complete short answers to questions related to the readings, or offer reflective, critical, short essays related to the topic of interest. Such assignments will contain instructions on how to submit your answers.
It is important that you complete the assigned readings. Groups will be discussing and reflecting upon those readings and, as we complete our final projects, it will be important for you to be able to think about the project in the context of readings you might have completed. (Readings are also fair game for quizzes)

• Reading the material is part of the point! Don’t have an existing NLP system think for you, the point is for you to think. If you are wondering, “Why?”, well ask in class and we’ll have a convo.

Locations for Course Information

• The course has a Canvas site where information about the course is posted. You will also use this Canvas site to turn in most of your work in the class. Please check it frequently.

Academic Responsibility

• The Course Collaboration Rules policy is explained under the description of each component of the course (in the following section)

The University defines academic integrity as the pursuit of scholarly activity in an open, honest and responsible manner. Dishonesty for the purposes of this course includes, but is not limited to, cheating, plagiarizing, fabricating information or citations, facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others, having unauthorized possession of examinations, submitting work of another person or work previously used without informing the instructor, or tampering with the academic work of other students.

Please do not put me in a situation that requires reporting as per University Senate Policy G-9, it’s not something I want to have to do.

A note on use of generative AI systems

• I don’t consent or agree to allowing the content for this course to be input into a generative AI system, nor do I consider it acceptable to use generative AI systems for course work outside of specific approval. In the end, you are getting in the way of your own learning and giving unauthorized access of content in this course to companies that, ultimately, would be perfectly fine if all human activity is automated (no matter the quality), as long as the bottom-line is good. Think critically and understand that your practices now may affect your labor in the future. We can’t control how other entities use generative AI systems, but we can encourage critical engagement with such systems in this class!
• Also, the environmental impacts of these systems aren’t great…a reminder! (And please don’t believe those “this has less environment impact than a human processing information” arguments, those obfuscate the fact that, you know, people are alive and live their lives nonetheless.)
• I do allow some flexlibility in thinking and there are very limited reasonable use cases all things considered: Interested in using a generative AI system for a particular use case? Come to office hours and we can talk through it.

Class Engagement and Work

Pay attention to the percentages. Consider how much an assignment is worth before you lose 5 gazzilion hours of sleep over it! Note that we’re grading a bit differently this semester than what you might be used to seeing. For one, there are no midterms. Quizzes will be similar to exams in some ways, but will hopefully encourage distributed learning as opposed to you cramming a bunch of topics the day before the midterm.

Final Project (25%)

There will be one final project during the semester. The final phase of the project will include a group presentation and a final paper/report at the end of the semester.

Unless specified otherwise, projects will likely be completed in groups of 4.

Engagement (in-class participation, and assignments) (35%)

This section will incorporate a diverse set of activities both in and out of the classroom. Throughout the semester, we will use in-class group work to enhance the lecture material (for example, situating theoretical concepts in certain scenarios). In addition, you may be given short practice problems (better known as homework) to complete before the following lecture. If you have to miss class for a legitimate reason and miss an engagement opportunity, contact me and we can talk about how you can make-up the assignment.

Class participation (5% of total grade)

In this course there are two main ways to productively participate in this class:

• Come to class and participate in activities where requested.
  • In terms of in-class participation, this grade will typically come down to participation in Kahoots that we’ll do as a part of our lecture section time.
• Participating in the class discussions or questions on Canvas will also be counted towards this grade.

Classwork and Homework (30%)

• Many of our lectures, will be active in that we will spend a good portion of that lecture working on an assignment/challenge/problem. When we do this, I will note when the completed version is due (and it will be noted in the assignment write-up.) If you happen to not be able to attend that particular class, you are heavily encouraged to schedule a 15 minute meeting slot to meet with me so that we can discuss the assignment.
• Some of these assignments will be graded on completion/attempt (as in “did you make a reasonable attempt at it?”), but I will note when completing specific tasks will be important for your grading.

If you get a grade on a (non-attempt-based) assignment that you find unsatifactory and would like to improve your grade, there will be a 2 day period after the grades are released to the class in which students have the opportunity to improve their grade up to a maximum of 90% of the original points. Thus, if you have a 75%, this might be worth it, if you had a 92%, you cannot improve your grade further through this improvement opportunity.

Weekly Journal (5% of total grade)

Everyone will have to do a reflection (journal) every 2 weeks (pay attention to your weeks, they may differ from a classmates!), some weeks I may provide a prompt for response. On weeks where there is no prompt, I’ll expect you to reflect upon your status in the class and how you are doing. (Did you learn something new, find something interesting, and/or are you stuck on something? Talk about it here :-) ). All journals will need to follow the template provided. There will be no make-ups for this and late journals will not be accepted. Journals will have a few days in which they will be open for submission that you can submit early, but don’t submit earlier than intended for the assignment.

If I see that enough folks are not reflecting in their journals: Less than adequate journal entries may receive a 3/5. Adequate Journal entries may receive a 4/5. Only exemplary entries (particularly self reflective and/or critical, potentially with multimedia where appropriate) may receive 5/5.

Weekly group shared notes (5% of total grade)

Everyone must sign-up to contribute to in-class notes for a different topic. In groups of students, you’ll take the lecture contents and code demos of that topic and merge them into a “textbook chapter.” Examples will be shown in the first week of class. At the end, you all will have collectively written a document for reference and will have completed a collaborative project to be proud of. Throughout the class, you and your peers will have a resource to supplement lectures.

Quizzes (20% [or 30% if skipping Final Exam])

There will be a short 10-15 minute quiz some weeks in this class. Potential quiz days are shown on the schedule and will be at the beginning of the class. If you get to class late or miss that class, you will have the option of scheduling a time to makeup that quiz, but such an arrangement must be made within a week of that quiz. If you need to makeup a quiz, you should schedule an office hours appointment with Prof. Dancy or the TA. In-person quizzes only.

A maximum of two such make-ups will be given unless otherwise arranged.

Your lowest quiz grade will be dropped. Because of these regular quizzes, there will be no midterm exam!

Final Exam (Optional, 10%)

You will have an optional final exam. If you are satisfied with your quiz grade, you can have quizzes count for 30% of your grade (20% + 10%) and not participate in the Final Exam. If you don’t attend the final exam, you will automatically have quizzes count for 30% of your grade.

Covid-19 and sickness

While COVID-19 cases have decreased substantially since fall of 2021, COVID-19 remains a pandemic. More transmissible variants are a major concern. Penn State urges everyone to continue to take steps to protect not only themselves, but their colleagues, friends, and the campus by practicing good hand hygiene, staying home if you are sick, being up to date on vaccinations and boosters, and wearing a mask indoors. There is evidence that masks are effective in reducing the transmission of COVID-19 (e.g., Li et al., 2020, Lima et al., 2020, Talic et al., 2021) and everyone is strongly encouraged to wear masks while indoors.

In general, if you believe you might be sick, wear a mask. It’s relatively straightforward way to reduce transmission.

Special Accommodations

Penn State welcomes students with disabilities into the University’s educational programs. Every Penn State campus has an office for students with disabilities. Student Disability Resources (SDR) website provides contact information for every Penn State campus https://equity.psu.edu/offices/student-disability-resources/campus-offices. For further information, please visit Student Disability Resources website http://equity.psu.edu/sdr/.   

In order to receive consideration for reasonable accommodations, you must contact the appropriate disability services office at the campus where you are officially enrolled, participate in an intake interview, and provide documentation: See documentation guidelines http://equity.psu.edu/sdr/guidelines. If the documentation supports your request for reasonable accommodations, your campus disability services office will provide you with an accommodation letter. Please share this letter with your instructors and discuss the accommodations with them as early as possible. You must follow this process for every semester that you request accommodations. 

Non-Student Circumstances

I recognize that the college experience can sometimes be overwhelming and stressful trying to balance your academic pursuits with your non-academic life and interests. If you feel that things are getting overwhelming, please seek help. I am happy to talk to you and point you to a resource on campus that can work with you to get the help you need.

Many students at Penn State will face personal challenges or have psychological needs that may interfere with their academic progress, social development, or emotional wellbeing. The university offers a variety of confidential services to help you through difficult times, including individual and group counseling, crisis intervention, consultations, online chats, and mental health screenings. These services are provided by staff who welcome all students and embrace a philosophy respectful of clients’ cultural and religious backgrounds, and sensitive to differences in race, ability, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Counseling and Psychological Services at University Park (CAPS) http://studentaffairs.psu.edu/counseling/: 814-863-0395

Counseling and Psychological Services at Commonwealth Campuses (https://studentaffairs.psu.edu/counseling/caps-campuses)

Penn State Crisis Line (24 hours/7 days/week): 877-229-6400 Crisis Text Line (24 hours/7 days/week): Text LIONS to 741741

Basic Needs Security

Any student who has difficulty affording groceries or accessing sufficient and nutritious food to eat every day, or who lacks a safe and stable place to live, and believes it is affecting their learning, is urged to contact Student Affairs for support. Furthermore, I encourage you to notify me of this as well - I will keep all such information confidential. This will enable me to provide any resources that I may possess and identify other resources in the University. For a start see the PSU basic needs and support website: https://studentaffairs.psu.edu/basic-needs-support

See also this PSU article - https://www.psu.edu/news/story/student-guide-food-and-housing-security-resources-penn-state/

Education Equity Concerns and Reporting Bias

Penn State University has adopted a “Protocol for Responding to Bias Motivated Incidents” that is grounded in the policy that the “University is committed to creating an educational environment which is free from intolerance directed toward individuals or groups and strives to create and maintain an environment that fosters respect for others.” That policy is embedded within an institution traditionally committed to academic freedom. Bias motivated incidents include conduct that is defined in University Policy AD 91: Discrimination and Harassment, and Related Inappropriate Conduct. Students, faculty, or staff who experience or witness a possible bias motivated incident are urged to report the incident immediately by doing one of the following:

• Submit a report via the Report Bias webpage
• Contact one of the following offices:

University Police Services, University Park: 814-863-1111 Multicultural Resource Center, Diversity Advocate for Students: 814-865-1773 Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity: 814-865-5906 Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs: 814-865-0909 Affirmative Action Office: 814-863-0471

• Dialing 911 in cases where physical injury has occurred or is imminent

Reporting Sexual Misconduct

Sexual misconduct is never tolerated at Penn State. Prohibited conduct includes sexual and gender-based harassment, stalking, sexual assault, and dating violence. These behaviors are not allowed in the classroom, the campus community, labs, or anywhere students, staff, and faculty are located. Prohibited behaviors can include degrading comments such as belittling female-identified students, LGBTQ+ individuals, and gender-diverse students. It can also include harassment, touching someone without their consent, following someone without consent, repeated calls or messaging, physical acts of violence, and more. In other words, professional and appropriate behavior is always expected, and inappropriate or unprofessional behavior is never tolerated. For more information, please refer to the Student Code of Conduct and Penn State Policies AD85 and AD91. ([Title IX Sexual Harassment

Penn State Policies (psu.edu)](https://policy.psu.edu/policies/ad85) and [Discrimination and Harassment and Related Inappropriate Conduct

Penn State Policies (psu.edu)](https://policy.psu.edu/policies/ad91))

If you or anyone you know has experienced or is concerned about inappropriate or unprofessional behavior, you can talk with College, or School leadership, your instructor, academic advisor, or another trusted faculty/staff member, report to police or the Office of Sexual Misconduct Reporting & Response (titleix.psu.edu), or you can seek confidential support and assistance from the Gender Equity Center. The Gender Equity Center supports any student who has had negative relationship experiences including those impacted by sexual violence, relationship violence, stalking, harassment, and other campus climate issues. Services include one on one crisis intervention/support, advocacy, exploring options, accommodations, safety planning, and referrals. They also promote awareness, build support for survivors, and conduct educational programs and events. All services are free and confidential. [Gender Equity Center

Penn State Student Affairs (psu.edu)](https://studentaffairs.psu.edu/genderequity)

Religious Holidays

Accommodations for religious holidays can be made, send a request and we’ll talk about it.

Academic Integrity Statement

Academic integrity is the pursuit of scholarly activity in an open, honest, and responsible manner. Academic integrity is a basic guiding principle for all academic activity at The Pennsylvania State University, and all members of the University community are expected to act in accordance with this principle. Consistent with this expectation, the University’s Code of Conduct states that all students should act with personal integrity, respect other students’ dignity, rights, and property, and help create and maintain an environment in which all can succeed through the fruits of their efforts. 

Academic integrity includes a commitment by all members of the University community not to engage in or tolerate acts of falsification, misrepresentation, or deception. Such acts of dishonesty violate the fundamental ethical principles of the University community and compromise the worth of work completed by others. 

Important Disclaimer

This is a living document. The instructor promises the best effort in adhering to the above rules but reserves the right to change them if deemed necessary. For instance, slight alterations to the course schedule are possible if the class needs more/less time for a certain topic; additional readings may be assigned during the semester as needed; and so on. Updates will be announced typically in class and likely posted on the course Canvas. Check the course Canvas site at least daily.

Syllabus was written by Prof. Dancy, but has graciously borrowed wording from several professors over the years.