Opinion or Voices

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College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Education

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Mon, 06/09/2025 - 11:05

’14 EdD alum Fleda Fleming reflects on the legacy of the state’s 2013 dissolution of the Inkster School District and how her nonprofit has helped restore a lost sense of community.

Alum Fleda Fleming stands at the former site of Inkster High School, which was torn down after the state dissolved the city's school district in 2013. Photo by Annie Barker

Is the generative AI hype bubble about to burst?

lblouin — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:08:28 +0000

Is the generative AI hype bubble about to burst? lblouin Mon, 03/10/2025 - 09:08

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked some of the broadest societal discussions about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in recent memory. In the year after its debut, it was easy to find stories about the potential for large language models, the AI technology underlying ChatGPT and similar products, to totally restructure certain industries. Some looked out even further and worried that AI could eventually threaten human civilization.

In retrospect, the expectations were perhaps too tall for what was, at the time, a fascinatingly good chatbot that was still prone to lying and inexplicable hallucinations. Even with these limitations, investors have been bullish about the technology, with investments in generative AI technologies topping $1 trillion. But now, two years on, with super compelling use cases yet to materialize, some are starting to wonder whether the industry could be dangerously overvalued and overhyped. After all, the most commonly deployed uses — customer service chatbots, AI enhanced search (which has inspired an internet backlash and interesting workarounds), AI summaries of product reviews and help writing emails — aren’t life-changing. Even in the field of coding, where LLMs have arguably shown the most practical promise, applications are still limited. Moreover, there are huge concerns that ChatGPT and similar technologies are actually doing damage to society, by helping students cheat, erasing recent reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and capitalizing on creators’ work without their permission.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Paul Watta says these are all valid concerns. His own take is that it’s “going to be tough” for big bets on generative AI to pay off, and it’s completely possible the industry is heading for a reality check soon. (More on this below.) But he’s also not writing off the potential for some game-changing use cases to still emerge. His main reason for tempered optimism is that LLMs have undergone quite a lot of meaningfully technical evolution over the past two years, a story that often gets lost in the media’s coverage of generative AI. He describes the initial releases of ChatGPT and similar products as “chat tools,” whereas the new generations are “reasoning models.” Watta says the former were basically extremely powerful predictive text machines: Based on a text-based prompt, the model would use its knowledge of the patterns of human language to string together words that felt like an appropriate answer. Sometimes the outputs were really great. Other times, particularly when the technology failed to capture the full meaning of the prompt, its answers were frustratingly unhelpful. This is, for example, why early generations of LLMs generally failed as customer service chatbots. They simply couldn’t accurately interpret the nuances of people’s troubleshooting questions, let alone integrate with things like databases of relevant customer information.

Watta says reasoning models emerged to overcome these shortcomings. The main difference is that a reasoning model essentially thinks before it speaks. Rather than generating a quick text-based output based on a single computational line of thought, a reasoning model breaks a prompt down into its component parts to try to better understand the context of the task being asked of it. It then considers multiple options for its response and chooses an answer based on refined numerical parameters established during the model’s training that steer it toward more desirable results. The newer models can also quickly ingest and respond to new information. “That’s really one of the best use cases for it right now. It can take in all kinds of documents — like business prospectuses from a bunch of companies — and generate a summary report for you that’s really quite good,” Watta says. “So that’s something that might have taken an intern 30 hours to do, and now you can do it in minutes.” Because of this fundamentally different architecture, reasoning models also do a reasonably good job of showing how they arrived at a conclusion. Original LLMs were black boxes — not even their designers had a clue how they were coming up with their responses.

The other reason that Watta is still not counting out LLMs is that the technology is evolving very rapidly. Watta says that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT), boasts that every version they release is a 10-fold improvement and that the newest version, expected any day now, could surpass that pace. That’s fast even for the tech sector. There is at least some concrete evidence to demonstrate that progress. For example, Watta keeps an eye on competitive programming challenges on platforms like Kaggle, where companies post real-world unsolved programming problems for the world’s best developers to tackle. The earliest releases of LLMs were essentially non-competitors as coders. But Altman says internal benchmarks for their most recent model put it in the Top 50. Watta wouldn’t be shocked if the pending releases of ChatGPT or other models end up in the Top 10, or even land at No. 1.

Watta pulls up a website showing what ChatGPT actually looks like: huge data centers that use massive amounts of electricity. Watta says electricity consumption by AI-based technologies could become a hot-button policy issue in the future. Photo by Annie Barker

Even more interesting than the pace of development is that there now appears to be legitimate competition in the LLM space. Earlier this year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek released an LLM model that caused instant disruption. The big revelation wasn’t that DeepSeek was better than ChatGPT — though Watta says, by some benchmarks, DeepSeek slightly outperforms the best models out there. It was that this startup had managed to build this almost-just-as-good reasoning model using far less powerful technology, thanks to a U.S. trade policy which banned the highest-powered graphics processing units from being sold to Chinese companies. These chips, made by the U.S. company NVIDIA, were assumed to be essential to creating high-quality LLMs. “They appear to have proved that idea wrong,” Watta says. “What the DeepSeek team did is the classic startup story that Silicon Valley used to do. Startups never have enough resources, so you have to optimize what you have. The big players become lazy, they don’t look for new ideas, and so they overspend to solve a problem. A startup can’t do that. That’s how the little guy beats the big guy.” Moreover, Watta says it’s notable that DeepSeek made key features open source and published technical details about how they arrived at their performance breakthroughs. U.S. companies typically have just published benchmark performance but don’t share the details of how they got there.

Watta says, for him, the biggest takeaway from DeepSeek’s release wasn’t technological; it was its impact on the markets. The day after DeepSeek’s debut, NVIDIA’s stock fell by 17%. “The market lost half a trillion dollars. From one release. That’s scary,” he says. He argues that indicates we may be entering a period where venture capitalists become more discerning about their investments in LLM development. Moreover, that’s just one of many possible “bottlenecks” Watta and others foresee. There’s still the nagging question of how much more these models can be improved, given that they thrive on consuming human-produced data and that supply could run dry in the next few years. Newer models still lie and hallucinate, though not as much. In addition, some are growing increasingly worried about the electricity consumption of LLMs and AI-based technologies more generally. Currently, AI accounts for about 3% of global electricity use, but that number is expected to grow in the coming years. (By one estimate, a single ChatGPT query consumes about as much electricity as a light bulb does in 20 minutes and 10 times as much as a standard Google search.) Moreover, this growth in electricity demand from AI comes at a time when the push toward electrification in the transportation and heating sectors is already expected to strain the electric grid. Watta says if AI is seen as the reason for spikes in electricity cost, brownouts or an impediment in the fight against climate change, the public could sour on the industry.

Similarly, he says LLMs could run into hurdles with existing privacy law. Watta says one of the more hopeful applications for these new reasoning models could lie in solving complex medical problems. “But when you’re talking about people’s medical information, we have strict regulatory frameworks, like HIPAA, which are designed to protect people’s privacy. With something like that, there is no room for error,” he says. “People have already gotten a little uncomfortable with these technologies making decisions that impact their safety or their financial lives. Now what if someone uses the technology to make a virus that kills millions of people? That could create a major backlash. Even if it wasn’t something that catastrophic, if people’s views go negative, that could constrain the development and shake the markets, which could have large economic consequences. Because, at least for now, the markets are still betting on a big pay day.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Technology

Administration & Governance

Off

Mon, 03/10/2025 - 13:07

Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI has yet to produce a game-changing use case. Professor Paul Watta breaks down whether the trillion dollar bet on generative AI will pay off or go bust.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Paul Watta. Photo by Annie Barker

Meet the first ��-Dearborn alum elected to the U-M Board of Regents

lblouin — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 13:21:04 +0000

Meet the first ��-Dearborn alum elected to the U-M Board of Regents lblouin Wed, 02/12/2025 - 08:21

In December 2024, Carl Meyers visited the ��-Dearborn campus for his official swearing-in to the University of Michigan Board of Regents. For him, the location felt apropos. “What better place to start than at the beginning?” Meyers said in his remarks, referring to his formative undergraduate years at ��-Dearborn in the late 1970s. Meyers, who grew up two miles from the university, says he and his family chose ��-Dearborn for reasons that will sound familiar to many of today's students. Living at home was a practical way to make college more affordable — which was important given that Meyers had to pay his tuition with money he saved from his summer night shifts on a truck assembly line and a personal side business painting and wallpapering people’s homes. His original plan was to attend ��-Dearborn for a year, do well and then transfer to the Ann Arbor campus. But from his first moments as a student, he started putting down roots that proved hard to pull up. “Some of the people I met at my orientation at the Henry Ford mansion are still friends to this day,” Meyers says. “That first year, I got involved in Student Government, got involved in politics on campus, and I ended up staying all four years.”

Meyers says ��-Dearborn in the mid-to-late 1970s was, in some ways, a pretty different place. For one, it was cozier, with a total enrollment under 5,000 students and a much smaller physical footprint. He estimates his incoming class was around 1,000 students and he remembers playing intramural football on the site where the Renick University Center now stands. But in other ways, he thinks the vibe has remained remarkably consistent over the 50 years since he attended. On a non-residential campus, he says you had to work a little harder to cultivate a social life — an ethos that’s still echoed by students today. Most importantly, he says Dearborn was then, and is now, “a serious place.” It’s not a place you go, he says, if your idea of college is huge frat parties on the weekends, or even sit-ins in an administration building. “Students at ��-Dearborn are people who have families, mortgages, homes, they have car payments, they have childcare to worry about,” Meyers says. They are pragmatic students who primarily see college as a path to a better economic future for them and their families.

To keep that dream within reach, college must remain affordable for working and middle class families, Meyers says. Affordability was the backbone of his 2024 regents campaign — and three previous unsuccessful runs for the board dating back to 2004. Meyers says his concern over the affordability of higher education grew organically out of his own professional life as an investment advisor. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he helped many clients put together financial plans to pay for their children’s college education. Back then, he says there were some pretty good options. “The bond rates were 8%. The Michigan Education Trust was priced below market value,” he recalls. But in the early 2000s, tuition rates began a steep climb, which Meyers attributes mostly to the increased availability of student loans and decreased investment by the state in higher education. “That dream started to become out of reach,” he says. “Families couldn’t afford it with normal investment and savings strategies. So what did they do? Some sacrificed their own future for their children by raiding their retirements or home equity. More often, people took on student loans.”

Meyers (left) with his father, Carl, at the December oath ceremony on the ��-Dearborn campus. Photo by Annie Barker

At that time, Meyers, who has long been active in the Michigan Republican Party, started sounding the alarm bells, including with some U-M Regents, with whom he was friends or acquaintances. He says the prevailing attitude, however, was essentially that the debt was still worth it, given that those with college degrees had much higher lifetime earnings. Meyers didn’t see it that way. Instead, he saw that student debt often rippled through people’s lives, including delaying other important life decisions, like buying a home or starting a family. And that had consequences for their long-term wealth, their ability to pass wealth onto their children and their well-being. “When I ran in 2004 for the first time, I was saying that in the next generation or two, if we don’t get a handle on this, there will be a massive student debt problem in this country and college education will be out of reach for many,” Meyers says. “Twenty years later, Americans are carrying $1.9 trillion in student debt. To put that in perspective, there is approximately $1 trillion in consumer debt outstanding today. And the travesty is that it’s very difficult to discharge student debt through bankruptcy.”

This time around, Meyers' affordability-based message resonated with voters: He was the top vote-getter among all candidates elected to governing boards for U-M, Michigan State and Wayne State — the three state universities with constitutionally mandated elected boards of regents. He says he’s excited that one of the big agenda items for the U-M Regents will be working out the details of a recently announced expansion of the Go Blue Guarantee — a financial aid program that supports free and reduced tuition for high-achieving students from lower-income families on all three campuses. Meyers says the initiative has the ability to put college back within reach for thousands of families. "If you can take the cost issue out of the formula, you can begin to address greater affordability for all — at least to a point. For example, to tell a family to go out and borrow $150,000, it’ll be a good investment — that’s a very hard message to sell to a family whose home might not even be worth that much. But now, if you can say that tuition for your son or daughter is free at the University of Michigan, I think they’re going to figure the rest out. So I think the expansion of the Go Blue Guarantee is absolutely one of the best policy decisions we can make.”

Along with continuing to beat the drum on affordability, Meyers’ other big priority is to advocate for investment in ��-Dearborn and the regional campuses more generally. He says that’s not something that just started with his term on the Board of Regents. For example, he says, for years, he urged his friend Ron Weiser, who Meyers is succeeding on the board, to “get over to Dearborn” and see what makes the place special. Weiser did, and he and his wife, Eileen, ended up donating $1.25 million for the renovation of the campus’ Engineering Lab Building. “Mike Behm, who’s on the board now, he’s close to ��-Flint like I am close to ��-Dearborn. So it’s kind of up to us to keep the awareness out there,” Meyers says. “It’s so easy to become immersed in everything that’s going on in Ann Arbor and see Dearborn or Flint as a secondary product. But I see ��-Dearborn as a valuable part of the University of Michigan’s portfolio, because it gives students a chance to get a University of Michigan education who might not otherwise have the means to do it. So I’m honored to be the first regent from the Dearborn campus. A bunch of us have tried before, and I’m honored to be the one who could do it.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Off

Mon, 02/17/2025 - 13:18

’79 College of Business graduate Carl Meyers talks about his time at ��-Dearborn and why he thinks U-M’s regional campuses are so important.

U-M Regent Carl Meyers (right) poses for a photo with Michigan Supreme Court Justice Brian Zahra at Meyers' Dec. 12 oath ceremony on the ��-Dearborn campus. Photo by Annie Barker

Can we still find a path to civil discourse?

lblouin — Mon, 20 May 2024 14:01:40 +0000

Can we still find a path to civil discourse? lblouin Mon, 05/20/2024 - 10:01

In his younger days, ��-Dearborn Chancellor Domenico Grasso wasn’t much of a reader, aside from his assigned school readings, like “Lord of the Flies,” “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Julius Caesar.” It’s something he chalks up to a number of factors. His Italian immigrant parents, who didn’t read English, didn’t encourage reading at home. As a teenager, he devoted much of his free time to sports. And his main academic interests were math and science, not disciplines, like literature, that didn’t give the indisputable answers he was interested in. That started to change when Grasso met his now-wife of 35 years. Susan, a fellow engineer who started college in the Honors program in U-M’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts, was the opposite — an adventurous and enthusiastic reader who consumed everything from novels to nonfiction, science to literature. When they started dating, he tried to explain that he simply didn’t have the attention span for reading. But she didn’t buy it. “Then why don’t you just read one or two pages and put the book down?” she said. Such a straightforward and simple solution hadn’t occurred to him. He remembers starting with Sinclair Lewis, a novelist and playwright who wrote prescient social commentaries on topics as diverse as the banality of middle class life and the dangers of American fascism. One or two pages at a time, Grasso made his way through Lewis’ “Main Street,” then “Babbitt,” then book after book. The habit stuck.

Now, Grasso says his enthusiasm for reading matches Susan’s. And he’s equally adventurous. Though he’s an environmental engineer by training, his reading preferences bend toward literature, the social sciences and philosophy — interests you see reflected in his selections for the Chancellor’s Book Club, a campus group he started several years ago. His inaugural pick, “Klara and the Sun,” a dystopian novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a commentary on the nature of love that focuses on the life of an artificial being. “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamín Labatut is a novel based on real-life scientists that explores the links between discovery and humanity’s penchant for destruction. Annie Ernaux’s “A Man’s Place” probes the familial tensions that arise from transcending social class. Grasso’s latest selection, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been influential in helping us understand important fractures now plaguing society.

Grasso says his motivation for starting the club was straightforward. “To be honest, there are a lot of book clubs out there and I didn’t want to participate in a book club,” he explains. “I just made an offer: If anyone wants to read the same book I’m reading, we can have a discussion.” Grasso hopes the club offers a window into the ideas and perspectives that inform his approach as chancellor. And he believes reading and discussing a really interesting book can, in fact, be entertaining. But the book club is also a gesture toward one of his core values: That we need to have spaces on campus, and in our lives, for discussing provocative, consequential issues and ideas in a thoughtful, open-minded way.

It may sound simple, but the idea that civil dialogue can exist is something that many have, frankly, given up on. Say it out loud, and it sounds a little old school. Some might find it Pollyannaish. Polarization, particularly in the political sphere, along with an accompanying hardening of belief systems, has led many to judge that it’s no longer worth trying to have conversations with colleagues, friends, relatives and neighbors who have different views. Grasso, for one, still thinks such a thing is possible. Or more specifically, he doesn’t have a lot of optimism for a society that completely loses that skill. “I think it is our only hope,” Grasso says. “What I believe isn’t too far from what Thomas Jefferson said about the prerequisite for democracy being an informed electorate. I think you can make the same argument that if you want an inclusive, nurturing, welcoming environment for all the people who live in our society, you need a well-educated group of people who can think through the challenges we have. And we’re losing the ability to have these kinds of conversations.”

Grasso is happy to see that kind of thoughtful dialogue happening within the book club and its sister group, the Chancellor's Video Club, where participants watch and then discuss big idea YouTube videos. (The first was the classic 1965 James Baldwin-William F. Buckley debate and the latest was a panel discussion of Francis Fukuyama’s “Liberalism and Its Discontents.”) Perhaps it’s not surprising things are going well. The clubs’ most active participants tend to be faculty members who are well-practiced in debating ideas and coexisting with colleagues who have different opinions. But as he looks across the university, he thinks we are missing out on some opportunities to nurture the open-mindedness, humility and broad curiosity that he thinks are necessary ingredients for civil discourse and thoughtful problem solving. He points to his own discipline, engineering, as an area where he thinks a narrow mindset is undercutting engineering’s broader potential. “We talk about engineering like it’s only an extension of math and science, and unfortunately, I see so many engineering students, like my younger self, who see the humanities, and English and reading as fluff,” he says. “I even remember a celebratory reception for a colleague who was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, where he proudly declared that he had never read a novel! But engineering is rarely simply math and science. It’s taking math and science and applying it to human problems. Robert Pirsig, who wrote ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ observed that technology ends up doing such ugly things because it’s disconnected in any real sense from humanity. Engineers often create things because they can, but without thought as to how their creativity is going to be absorbed and adapted by humanity. And that’s because many engineers are detached from the essence of the human condition.”

Grasso also thinks that, despite the right intentions, we lost the plot when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. “There is no question that whoever is on campus, we want them to represent the whole of human potential,” Grasso says. “But I think we reached a stage with DEI where it started to take on a life independent of what its original objectives were. It was a means that became an end. And we don't have as much to show for it as may have been possible. I do feel like we went down some wrong paths in DEI planning, and I want to go back on the trail a little bit and look for the flashes on the trees and get back on the right trail.” Grasso’s idea for that centers around a new Office of Holistic Excellence, which was recently featured in an article in Learning Well magazine. He concedes it’s an “ambiguous” name — something he says is intentional so the office can become an umbrella for a broad group of initiatives. Specifically, Grasso wants the office to support a more encompassing sense of diversity and inclusivity, which emphasizes a diversity of perspectives and disciplines, in addition to demographic diversity. His thinking is that the capacity for open-minded, thoughtful, cool-headed dialogue — the thing he feels is required to solve a diverse society’s biggest challenges — can be best nurtured by an environment in which members of our campus community encounter views that aren’t their own as a regular part of their lives here. Necessarily, this also means that the university must continue its efforts to ensure that education is accessible and its population is demographically diverse, two of the main goals of prior DEI initiatives. He just doesn't want the effort to be limited to the scope of the traditional DEI playbook.

Grasso isn’t pretending to have all the answers. In fact, his whole point is that he doesn’t — nor does anyone. He believes the best solutions, including in a complex and polarizing area like diversity and inclusion, will require everyone’s involvement. But he feels like, as chancellor, he can help set the tone. “At the end of the day, what I’d like is a community that’s more like the academy of ancient Greece,” he says. “Not that we’re walking around in togas, but that we’re asking important, relevant and deep questions. It’s better to be curious than confident. And I fear that our society is filled with an overabundance of confidence and a scant amount of curiosity. I’d like our campus to be the antidote to that. I’d like it to be a place where people are super curious, and they want to know about other cultures, other disciplines and other ways of thinking about important topics, so we can develop a clearer view for a collectively desirable future.”

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If you’re looking for something to add to your summer reading list, the next Chancellor’s Book Club selection is “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion” by Jonathan Haidt. The New York Times noted that Haidt’s 2012 book “wants to start a conversation about integrating a better understanding of human nature — our sentiments, sociality and morality — into the ways we debate and govern ourselves.” A discussion will be hosted in the fall. Story by Lou Blouin

Civics Awareness

Inclusion or Diversity

Chancellor

Off

Mon, 05/20/2024 - 14:01

In an era where strong opinions dominate and people are increasingly unwilling to entertain alternative perspectives, Chancellor Domenico Grasso is going old school in his effort to rebuild the foundation for debating big issues.

Credit: Michigan Photography

Could you be friends with a robot?

lblouin — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 17:10:14 +0000

Could you be friends with a robot? lblouin Mon, 04/01/2024 - 13:10

For the past few years, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Samir Rawashdeh has been building robots for his 7-year-old daughter, Maia, and his 5-year-old son, Adam. One of his first creations was a modified Roomba, the popular autonomous floor-cleaning robot, which he equipped with a vision system and topped with a googly-eyed Lego head and multicolor mini pom poms for hair. The souped-up Roomba would primarily look for and follow the kids around and then stop at a safe distance when it caught up to them. Even though its programming was simple, it was a huge hit with the kids. Maia would squeal as the Roomba “chased” her around the room. She’d ask it to accompany her on play missions around the house. She also figured out pretty quickly that she could trick it by hiding in her play tent, outside the reach of the Roomba’s camera.

Rawashdeh's second robot had a little more polish. Using 3-D printing plans he got from a Facebook group devoted to such things, he built a full-size replica of D-O, a scrappy Star Wars robot with a ducklike, pivoting conical head mounted to a thick off-road wheel. He then used his electrical engineering expertise to make it move. While the Roomba was autonomous, Rawashdeh opted for remote controls for D-O, thinking it would give the robot a wider range of intentional movements. With a radio controller in hand, Rawashdeh could make D-O not only chase the kids but run away from them. It could move its head in all directions, including shaking up and down for yes or sideways for no. When the kids would hug it, D-O could give them a catlike head love tap right back. With Rawashdeh’s latest version, D-O can talk.

Rawashdeh's D-O in action.

Rawashdeh says he initially started making the robots as a fun pandemic engineering activity that he and the kids could do together. But as he watched the kids play, he became fascinated by how they were interacting with the machines, especially D-O. The kids figured out pretty quickly that their dad was the one actually animating D-O, but in many ways, they didn’t care: They still reacted to D-O as though he was a “free agent.” The kids would talk with D-O and ask him to do things with them. They would give him affection. “One time, when I took D-O into one of my classes, Maia texted me and said, ‘Tell D-O that me and Adam love him,’” Rawashdeh remembers. Even without his own agency, D-O had become “somebody” to them — at least enough to miss him when he wasn’t around.

Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh

So what’s going on here? Or as Rawashdeh frames the question: “When does a bunch of plastic and wires and batteries and motors become more than that?” It’s not a question he can claim a definitive answer to, nor likely can anyone. The modern discipline of human-robot interaction is still very new, and you’ll find a wide range of ideas about what ingredients are essential to humans having meaningful social interactions with machines. Rawashdeh’s own take is that there is still a lot of exploratory trial and error going on among the designers, engineers and philosophers who think about these things. Most robots intended for social human interactions seem to contain at least some suggestions of biological anatomy. For example, Miko, an AI-powered robot that's being marketed as a companion for kids and who can even teach them social behaviors, has a friendly face. The engineers behind Paro went with a full biomimicry approach when they built an interactive baby seal to serve as a therapeutic companion animal. But there are also examples that completely buck this trend. The engineers behind Yolo, for example, which is advertised as a “creativity boosting robot” for children, actually let kids design it. The result was something that looks like an artsy bedside table lamp. It has no face and no eyes. Other than the wiry plastic strands shooting out of the top of it, which sort of look like hair, it’s not very creaturelike.

In his own informal trials with his kids, Rawashdeh noticed a couple qualities that seemed to be important for them to connect with the robots. First, movement helps, and specifically, an ability to move in response to something the kids are doing. Both the Roomba and D-O can do this. In the Roomba’s case, its movement is fully autonomous. But interestingly, the kids seem to be more engaged by the dad-controlled D-O, who, with its nods, sounds and affectionate head bumps, has a much greater range of responses. Rawashdeh’s observation that the kids know he’s animating D-O yet don’t seem to care is actually supported by some recent research suggesting that children’s tendency to anthropomorphize robots can be a powerful bonding force — even when they know the robot is not an independent being with its own inner psychological life. Rawashdeh also comes down in the camp that thinks looks matter, but it doesn’t take much. Even D-O’s hint of ducklike anatomy is enough to give it something that can be interpreted as a face. Interestingly, Maia has more or less the same take on all this as her dad. When Rawashdeh asked her if she could ever be friends with a robot, she quickly answered in the affirmative, then clarified — as long as it could follow her and was “very cute.”

Surprisingly, one thing Rawashdeh thinks is probably not that essential to forming a bond is speech. For example, they’ve had an Alexa in their house for a long time, and the kids will occasionally ask it questions, but they don’t think of it as a “playmate.” He also points out that R2-D2 from Star Wars is beloved but does not speak, and we form very strong bonds with our pet animals, who at least don’t speak our language. He thinks this peculiarity of speech, or conversational written language, might also explain why, despite some initial fears, technologies like ChatGPT seemingly haven’t unleashed a plague of socially isolating human-chatbot friendships. “I think part of what is going on here is nobody cares what a machine thinks, which is a key part of what makes our human-to-human relationships meaningful,” Rawashdeh says. “I think this is even the case with social media, which sort of feels like a lonesome experience between humans and technology. But it’s really more of a human-to-human interaction that’s mediated by technology. Why do we post our vacation photos on Instagram? It’s to show off where we’ve been to other people. If you had a robot liking all your posts, that wouldn’t be satisfying.”

This line of inquiry also, of course, begs some important questions about whether such human-robot relationships are good for us. Could they, for example, further transform or replace the human-to-human social interactions that have already taken a beating from technologies like television, the internet and smartphones? And should we be worried, in particular, about kids forming bonds with machines? Research in this area is still very new, but it is producing some interesting findings. On the positive side, there’s work suggesting that children with autism may actually learn better from robots, due to their more predictable responses. Paro, the therapeutic robotic seal, was shown to produce many of the same effects of traditional therapy animals. At least for now, a headline-grabbing study showing that human society could be a risk should we choose to befriend robots doesn’t exist. Rawashdeh says his kids, at least, don’t seem to be overly attached to D-O. Playing with their “very cute” droid is not an everyday activity at their house. Maia and Adam still like to play outside.

For Rawashdeh, this experience building robots for his kids has, however, inspired him to do some more formal work in this area. For one of his next projects, he’s experimenting with building a therapeutic robot that would essentially be a good listener, with a goal of potentially addressing certain gaps in the availability of mental health services. Powered by a modified large language model, it could engage people who, say, were having a bad day, with supportive, helpful humanlike dialogue. For the body, he’s thinking something suggestive of an owl — an animal associated with wisdom. It likely wouldn’t move around the room, but he would give it the ability to move its head and large, empathetic eyes, so it could appropriately make and break eye contact and “wouldn’t just stare at you.” “I’m thinking about the shortage in mental health services and the current loneliness epidemic, and how there are many people out there who could benefit from a helpful companion,” he says. On the other hand, he wonders if technology can be a salve for social isolation, which, in many ways, has been caused by technology. “That’s something I guess we’re still figuring out,” he says. “I think we still lack the language for describing what is going on,” he says. “Like, with music or art, we have established traditions and genres. We know, more or less, the key ingredients that go into making a Cubist painting or a certain type of song. But what makes a robot that humans will actually connect with?” On the front, Rawashdeh thinks we may still be shooting in the dark.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Off

Mon, 04/01/2024 - 17:06

CECS Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh creates interactive robots for his kids to play with. It’s taught him something about what it might take to make human-robot interactions meaningful.

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Samir Rawashdeh builds robots for his kids, many inspired by Star Wars characters. Photo courtesy Samir Rawashdeh

Living, working and learning in Detroit

lblouin — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 21:18:40 +0000

Living, working and learning in Detroit lblouin Mon, 01/15/2024 - 16:18

��-Dearborn students who want to learn about different cultures in a city that’s played an important role on the world stage don’t have to look far. With its rich history and historically Mexican, Greek, Polish, Irish and Southwest Asian neighborhoods, to name a few, Detroit is a great place for an intercultural experience, says Director of Global Engagement Scott Riggs. And Dearborn Wolverines can participate in Semester in Detroit, a four-month program where students can live, work and learn in the city.

“Global engagement does not have to be international. It’s intercultural. It is having an experience where you learn from someone who has a perspective that’s different from yours. U-M’s Semester in Detroit is a way to do this close to home,” Riggs says.

The SiD program, which is run out of ��-Ann Arbor and hosts classes at the ��-Detroit Center, gives ��-Dearborn students the opportunity to take urban and regional studies-themed courses and a Detroit-based internship for credit. Students are encouraged to live downtown at an affordable rate, but it is not required. SiD courses can be counted towards ��-Dearborn graduation requirements, but students should talk with their academic adviser to discuss how it fits with their degree program. Internships — which are with nonprofit organizations — are matched based on student interests.

The benefits of such an experience are extensive, Riggs adds: “Global engagement can help us work through our difficult differences and move toward better understanding one another, which ultimately is what is needed if we ever hope to address the numerous challenging borderless issues facing the world today.”

The program also gives students a chance to learn more about Michigan’s largest city. “The Semester in Detroit program gives a first-hand experience of immersing yourself in Detroit, while getting to know the neighborhoods, the people and the city itself,” Riggs explains.

Recently, three recent ��-Dearborn SiD alums shared a little about their experience.

Leah Williams, finding a future in the city

Leah Williams chose ��-Dearborn because it has a welcoming feel, was close to her Redford home and has smaller class sizes. But as friendly as the campus is, Williams wasn’t sure what exactly she wanted to study or where she’d find her people.

Then, during her first year at ��-Dearborn, she applied to the SiD program after learning about it in an email from the Dean of Students — and everything changed. “At that time, I was nervous to break out of my comfort zone. It can be a little scary to jump into something new. But I know college is about new experiences and growth, so I told myself to try,” she says. “It changed my life and I can’t recommend it enough.”

Williams, who chose to live in a SiD-designated apartment in Detroit’s Midtown during the four-month program, says she learned how to live independently, saw up close some of the challenges and opportunities in Detroit, met new friends from ��-Ann Arbor and ��-Dearborn, and took advantage of downtown experiences like ice skating at Campus Martius.

��-Dearborn students Leah Williams (center, in the Michigan hoodie) and Jordan Jones (in the yellow shirt) get a tour of a Feedom Freedom Growers garden site with Mama Myrtle Curtis (third from right), one of the founders of FFG. Photo courtesy Leah Williams

Williams, who loves theater and acts in local productions, completed an internship at Matrix Theatre Company in Southwest Detroit, where she assisted with community performances and promotion. She says that experience showed her how things she enjoys can have a place, even when it’s not a direct part of a career path. “I love theater, but didn’t see how it would be a part of my professional future. The internship showed me how I can incorporate my passion for things like theater into my career,” she says. “You can use the skills or talents that you have in other areas no matter the field you choose.”

Williams — who liked how the classes included learning excursions around the city — also found an area of study she felt connected to: the urban and regional studies major. She took courses that examined environmental concerns in Detroit, the city’s history, educational inequities, food justice efforts and more. “I feel like I have a deeper connection to the city — a city my parents grew up in. I saw how I can channel my passion of helping others into Detroit neighborhoods,” she says. “My parents told me what a special place Detroit was and is. And now I can honestly say that I get it. I love Detroit and can see my future there.”

Jordan Jones, the advocate who returned to college

Jordan Jones has worked for nonprofits and supported antiracist movement work for years. She says social justice efforts are necessary because they look to solve complex problems, but she has also noticed that they can fall short when they don’t offer feasible solutions.

“Legislators and policymakers think and speak in concrete terms. We can’t say, ‘defund the police’ without a tangible solution as to what will replace the police. If advocacy work doesn’t get down to brass tacks, people who we need to help make the changes might not listen,” Jones says. “Solutions need to be digestible and realistic. I returned to college to learn more about how to best help communities where I’m needed.”

Jones, who is pursuing a degree in health and human services with a concentration in public health, chose ��-Dearborn because she saw that the university works extensively in Detroit communities. Having experienced hardships in her own life — she was raised by a single mother following the murder of her father — Jones wants to help people connect to needed resources. “There were people there for me when I needed it,” she says. “And I am not sure where I would be today without them. Now I want to be that support for someone in need.”

When she learned about the Semester in Detroit program, Jones saw an opportunity to get an applied education. She worked as an intern at the Detroit Justice Center, where she assisted with several projects, including a Family Law Handbook, which will be distributed throughout the Michigan prison system to inform incarcerated citizens about their custodial rights. Through her courses, Jones met with Detroit artists and activists. She also participated in field visits to sites like Feedom Freedom Growers community garden on Detroit’s east side, and the James and Grace Lee Boggs School, an elementary school focused on community empowerment that is named after two legendary social justice activists.

“Sometimes, when we’re trying to create change, we feel like we’re working in isolation and wonder if we’re making an impact. But programs like SiD show us how to do this work in practical ways, in community. It lets us know that there are others out there who are working to change the status quo — even when we don’t see it, to know that it’s happening all around us. That energizes me and gives me momentum to keep moving forward,” Jones says. “When I applied to ��-Dearborn, I knew it would change me in ways I couldn’t know. It has. And I can say the same about my Semester in Detroit experience.”

Ivett Facundo, the lifelong Detroiter

Ivett Facundo grew up in Detroit. But she didn’t learn about her city’s deep roots until she took courses through SiD.

“Growing up in Detroit, I wasn't able to walk around as a kid because of how the media portrayed the city as not safe. This made my parents very protective of us, and like many other kids in the community, we had transportation challenges, immigration scares and other obstacles that prevented me from getting to know the city,” Facundo says. “The Semester in Detroit program opened my eyes to the people and history of my city.”

A first-generation Mexican-American, Facundo lives in Southwest Detroit and is surrounded by families from Mexico and Central and South America, but she didn’t know the history behind her community. Facundo says she learned more about the culture and needs of the neighborhoods as an intern at Garage Cultural, an arts organization that produces a variety of events, public art installations and educational programs.

Ivett Facundo, far left, is one of several recent Semester in Detroit students who grew up in the city. Photo courtesy Ivett Facundo

In addition, Facundo says her courses brought in community historians, took her to sites around the city that examined the city’s Black and Latino/Latina history and exposed her to a variety of cultural histories. She was inspired to complete an independent research project where she focused on the Mexicantown neighborhood. She says she learned how labor migration from Texas and Mexico helped create the culturally rich community she lived in as a child — and she was pleased to see the first historic marker honoring Tejano musical contributions to Michigan go up in 2023. It’s on the northeast corner of Bagley and 21st streets.

“More and more historians are advocating to document how Southwest Detroit came to be, the challenges people faced and the outcomes. Hopefully I’ll be in the mix to help with that,” she says.

Facundo also says she learned more about why her friend’s family was forced to move from the Delray home they owned. “I knew she had to move away when we were in high school and they were upset about it, but I didn’t know why. I learned it was to make room for a bridge that would allow for more trucks to travel across to Canada, which would benefit industry — but not the neighborhood,” she says, while also noting the environmental and health concerns in the neighborhood caused by higher levels of air and sound pollution due to increased semi-truck transportation. “Many people were displaced from their homes, which is not right, but it was still allowed to happen.”

Facundo, who graduated in December, says the program did more than help her feel more connected to her city — it also helped her map her future. Facundo recently accepted a full-time position with Deloitte Global, where she will focus on diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives along with corporate responsibility efforts.

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The SiD program is currently accepting applications and substantial need-based financial aid is available. Apply here. Article by Sarah Tuxbury

Experiential Learning

Off

Mon, 01/15/2024 - 21:16

Through U-M’s Semester in Detroit program, students meet community leaders and immerse themselves in the city – while earning a stipend and college credit.

Students visit a gallery at Feedom Freedom Growers during the Fall 2023 Semester in Detroit. Photo courtesy Leah Williams

Lynn Perry Wooten visits ��-Dearborn for Thought Leaders Series

lblouin — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 15:42:25 +0000

Lynn Perry Wooten visits ��-Dearborn for Thought Leaders Series lblouin Mon, 04/03/2023 - 11:42

Lynn Perry Wooten has been studying the challenges women face in American workplaces for more than two decades. In that time, she’s seen a lot of change, but also many familiar themes. For example, Wooten argues the recent pandemic-prompted “she-cession,” where women, especially younger women and women of color, left the traditional workforce in historic numbers, represents both a new phenomenon and a crisis whose dynamics have been “smoldering” for years. “Even now, business is one of the top majors in the country and when you look at gender parity . . . and you look at entry levels in the corporate suite, 48% [are women], but by the time you get to the C-suite, we’re down to 24%. This is that ‘leaky pipeline.’ For management, we get to 41%. By VP, it’s 30%. So something is happening in addition to the she-cession in the corporate sector,” Wooten says.

Scholars who study the leaky pipeline — the phenomenon where gender (and racial) representation lag the higher you get in an organization’s hierarchy — have identified a huge range of contributing factors, including a childcare crisis and a suite of persistent systemic and structural challenges. But Wooten argues that there are also “best practices” that can guide women seeking leadership positions and organizations looking to cultivate women leaders. Those themes are the subject of her recently co-authored book “Arrive and Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership.” During her Thought Leaders talk on the ��-Dearborn campus, Wooten discussed these practices, which bring together her and her colleagues’ research and advice from 24 women in top leadership positions.

Practice 1: Investing in your best self. Wooten argues you’ll put yourself in the best position to thrive if you have intimate knowledge of your strengths, values and what makes you joyful at work. Then, seek out or create workplace environments that allow these parts of your “best self” to thrive.

Practice 2: Embracing authenticity. In our workplaces, we often edit ourselves down to just the parts we think are work appropriate. Wooten says bringing your social identity, values and unique style to work is what makes you not like everybody else and can give you a “competitive advantage.”

Practice 3: Cultivating courage. Wooten says courage is rooted in introspection. It’s about knowing yourself, confronting your flaws, admitting you don’t know everything and using this to prepare for challenging situations. To do this, Wooten stresses that organizations need to cultivate supportive cultures that encourage innovative thinking and don't penalize people for taking productive risks.

Practice 4: Fostering resilience. Resilience fundamentally involves overcoming the fear, anxiety and selfishness that naturally accompany crisis situations. We can view moments of upheaval as opportunities to examine what skills we may need to develop to succeed in changing times.

Practice 5: Inspiring a bold vision. “Sadly … the research shows that women are not perceived as visionary. A man can say an idea in the room and we see it as brilliant. And when a woman says the same thing, it’s not seen as visionary. We wanted women to have tools to be visionary,” Wooten says. Among other things, this includes identifying what the world or organization needs, coming up with daring solutions and being able to communicate ideas in ways that resonate with people.

Practice 6: Creating a healthy team environment. Wooten says giving women opportunities to lead teams and projects early in their careers is crucial to fixing the leaky pipeline. Culture changes are important too. “Good teamwork is frequent and honest communication . . . it’s making time for the team to learn together, it’s appreciating the team, and it’s ensuring that when the team makes mistakes, the leader owns it, therefore it’s a psychologically safe culture.”

Practice 7: Committing to the work of the inclusive leader. Wooten argues doing the work of the inclusive leader starts with knowing your strengths, which leads to a knowledge of your biases. It’s also about embracing the value of equity and the idea that “everyone is not the same and everyone needs different things.” As a practical tool, she sees a lot of potential for “sponsoring” other people in the workplace. “In the African American community, there is a saying ‘lift as you climb.’ That is what sponsorship is about. It’s when someone else is not in the room, you’re elevating them. You’re looking to see, do we have fair representation across gender roles, and finally making that systems change.”

Missed the Thought Leader Series event and want to watch? Check out the recording.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Inclusion or Diversity

Strategic Planning

Off

Mon, 04/03/2023 - 15:42

The Simmons University president and former Ross School of Business professor shared her insights on the “she-cession” and best practices for supporting women in leadership.

Photo courtesy Simmons University

We’re not ready for the electrification era

lblouin — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:39:56 +0000

We’re not ready for the electrification era lblouin Wed, 03/08/2023 - 11:39

Fast forward a decade and the way we power our cars or heat our homes may look a lot different than it does today. Rather than stopping at the gas station every week to fill up, you’ll plug your electric vehicle (EV) into a small port on the side of your house anytime it’s sitting in the driveway. Instead of a natural gas-powered furnace or boiler, you’ll have an electric mini-split heat pump or two, a technology that works like an air conditioner in the summer, but when thrown in reverse, can actually heat your home, even if you live in a cold climate. While you’re at it, you may also swap out your gas stove, water heater and clothes dryer and make your home fully electric. Needless to say, while your gas bill might shrink or go away altogether, your electricity bill will go up, though on the whole, you’ll likely be saving a substantial amount of money. On average, it’s about three times more expensive to fill up a gas car than to charge an EV. And heat pumps usually offer savings over gas or oil furnaces, especially when volatile gas prices spike.

Associate Professor Wencong Su

Countries across the world are banking on this “electrification” of our homes and businesses — and a greening of electricity generation — to slash climate-warming emissions. Here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act offers generous incentives and tax credits, which greatly reduce the cost of the new technologies, and in some cases, make them free for lower-income folks. (Check your eligibility with this calculator.) But if we quickly ramp up our electricity use, it begs the question, can the grid deliver? Wencong Su, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in power systems, says it’s a complicated issue, but in short, the answer is “no way, not even close.” That is, unless we start making some big changes, relatively quickly. For starters, there’s the question of quantity: As we replace cars and appliances that directly burn fossil fuels with ones powered by electricity, will there actually be enough electrons to go around? Su says if you want an EV now, you shouldn’t be concerned. But as high-consuming technologies like electric cars and heat pumps become widespread, we’ll need a plan for making more electricity. For example, California recently passed a law requiring 35% of new cars to be zero-emissions by 2026, and 100% by 2035. To power millions of new EVs and electrify other parts of the economy still relying on fossil fuels, the state estimates it will need to triple power generation and build solar and wind facilities three to five times faster than it is now.

Su says things get even more complicated when you factor in the strain this could put on the transmission and distribution system, the network of large and small lines that carry electricity to our homes, buildings and businesses. These lines are designed to carry specific loads, and if demand rises beyond the limit of what a particular part of the transmission or distribution system can handle, we’ll need more capacity. If you add an EV charger to your house, it’s no big deal. But if suddenly most of your neighbors do too, “you could reach a point where we’re pushing the limits of the local distribution infrastructure that supplies a neighborhood,” Su says. “What makes it even more complicated is that user behavior of EV charging is unknown. It’s a black box. Will people all charge their EVs at the same time? Will a user charge at the same time every day, or at 5 p.m. today and 3 p.m. tomorrow? This makes it very challenging to predict the load.” Indeed, California’s plan for handling a surge in EVs depends on scenarios that predict charging during mostly off-peak hours, which some argue may be an unrealistic assumption.

We can of course upgrade our transmission and distribution lines, but it’s going to cost us. The U.S. electric grid has about 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and more than 5 million miles of distribution lines. Currently, the cost to build transmission lines is between $1 million and $5 million per mile, with distribution lines coming in around $30,000 to $150,000. “No one wants to pay for it,” Su says. “That’s why you’re seeing utilities focus on demand response or time-of-day pricing, which use price incentives to try to encourage users to use electricity during off-peak hours so they can keep rates roughly where they are now. This buys the utilities some time before they have to make major investments. But we’re adding all these incentives for EVs and heat pumps and basically skipping the infrastructure part.” The big thing that’s saving us for the time being, Su says, is the low market penetration of these new technologies, although this could be changing quickly. Last year, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces for the first time in the U.S., even without the benefit of the Inflation Reduction Act incentives, which started kicking in in January.

We’re adding all these incentives for EVs and heat pumps and basically skipping the infrastructure part.

There appears to be no getting around that fact that we’ll eventually have to build more power plants and make expensive upgrades to the grid. But Su notes these aren’t the only tools we have to keep the grid functioning as electricity demand rises. Su’s own research focuses on a variety of “smart grid” technologies, including DC microgrids, which could ease the related challenge of bringing more renewable energy onto the grid. He’s also optimistic that dynamic pricing schemes, which incentivize use during specific times, can help reduce demand during peak times and prevent brownouts. He also has his eye on new approaches, like “multi-life energy storage,” which envisions repurposing old EV batteries into a dispersed network of battery banks for backup and emergency use. Right now, he says the market penetration for EVs is so low that there isn’t much of a market yet for the used batteries, which are generally removed when they no longer hold three-quarters of their original charge. One side effect of having millions more EVs on the road is they’ll provide a steady supply of diminished, but still useful, batteries that can help shore up the grid.

Su thinks it will likely take a combination of all these approaches to prepare for the electrification era. We may also have to adjust some of our core expectations about electricity — namely that it’s cheap, it’s there whenever we need it, and it’s something we consume but don’t produce. As energy gets more expensive in an effort to preserve reliability, Su worries not just about a balance between supply and demand, but a gap between haves and have nots. He says neighborhoods with people able to afford new technologies like EVs and heat pumps are most likely to get the upgraded grid infrastructure. They also have the ability to put solar panels on their roofs and sell electricity, not just buy it. "We really need to pay attention to how this transition will impact underserved communities,” Su says. “People without extra income are already very sensitive to price, and they may not have the luxury of investing in technologies like solar panels or battery backup systems, which help them ride out a power outage or actually become energy producers.”

In short, Su says, the next iteration of our electric grid will only be a success if it’s both reliable and fair.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Technology

Off

Wed, 03/08/2023 - 16:38

To slash emissions and battle climate change, countries across the world are pushing the adoption of electricity-based technologies like electric vehicles and heat pumps. But Associate Professor Wencong Su says the grid is nowhere near ready for a lot more of us to be using so much more power.

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by Marianna, stockphoto-graf, moodboard, and phonlamaiphoto via Adobe Stock

AI's mysterious ‘black box’ problem, explained

lblouin — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:26:44 +0000

AI's mysterious ‘black box’ problem, explained lblouin Mon, 03/06/2023 - 12:26

Learning by example is one of the most powerful and mysterious forces driving intelligence, whether you’re talking about humans or machines. Think, for instance, of how children first learn to recognize letters of the alphabet or different animals. You simply have to show them enough examples of the letter B or a cat and before long, they can identify any instance of that letter or animal. The basic theory is that the brain is a trend-finding machine. When it’s exposed to examples, it can identify qualities essential to cat-ness or B-ness, and these ultimately coalesce into decision protocols that give us the ability to categorize new experiences automatically and unconsciously. Doing this is easy. Explaining how we do this is essentially impossible. “It’s one of those weird things that you know, but you don’t know how you know it or where you learned it,” says Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Samir Rawashdeh, who specializes in artificial intelligence. “It’s not that you forgot. It’s that you’ve lost track of which inputs taught you what and all you’re left with is the judgments.”

Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh

Rawashdeh says deep learning, one of the most ubiquitous modern forms of artificial intelligence, works much the same way, in no small part because it was inspired by this theory of human intelligence. In fact, deep learning algorithms are trained much the same way we teach children. You feed the system correct examples of something you want it to be able to recognize, and before long, its own trend-finding inclinations will have worked out a “neural network” for categorizing things it’s never experienced before. Pop in the keyword “cat” — or even the name of one of your favorite cats — into the search bar of your photo app and you’ll see how good deep learning systems are. But Rawashdeh says that, just like our human intelligence, we have no idea of how a deep learning system comes to its conclusions. It “lost track” of the inputs that informed its decision making a long time ago. Or, more accurately, it was never keeping track.

This inability for us to see how deep learning systems make their decisions is known as the “black box problem,” and it’s a big deal for a couple of different reasons. First, this quality makes it difficult to fix deep learning systems when they produce unwanted outcomes. If, for example, an autonomous vehicle strikes a pedestrian when we’d expect it to hit the brakes, the black box nature of the system means we can’t trace the system’s thought process and see why it made this decision. If this type of accident happened, and it turned out that the perception system missed the pedestrian, Rawashdeh says we’d assume it was because the system encountered something novel in the situation. We’d then try to diagnose what that could have been and expose the system to more of those situations so it would learn to perform better next time. “But the challenge is, can you get training data that covers everything?” Rawashdeh says. “What about when it’s sunny and a bit foggy, or they’ve just salted the roads and the asphalt now appears whiter than it usually does? There are an infinite number of permutations so you never know if the system is robust enough to handle every situation.”

Rawashdeh says this problem of robustness makes it difficult for us to trust deep learning systems when it comes to safety. But he notes the black box problem also has an ethical dimension. Deep learning systems are now regularly used to make judgements about humans in contexts ranging from medical treatments, to who should get approved for a loan, to which applicants should get a job interview. In each of these areas, it’s been demonstrated that AI systems can reflect unwanted biases from our human world. (If you want to know how AI systems can become racially biased, check out our previous story on that topic.) Needless to say, a deep learning system that can deny you a loan or screen you out of the first round of job interviews but can’t explain why, is one most people would have a hard time judging as “fair.”

So what can we do about this black box problem? Rawashdeh says there are essentially two different approaches. One is to pump the brakes on the use of deep learning in high-stakes applications. For example, the European Union is now creating a regulatory framework, which sorts potential applications into risk categories. This could prohibit the use of deep learning systems in areas where the potential for harm is high, like finance and criminal justice, while allowing their use in lower-stakes applications like chatbots, spam filters, search and video games. The second approach is to find a way to peer into the box. Rawashdeh says so-called “explainable AI” is still very much an emerging field, but computer scientists have some interesting ideas about how to make deep learning more transparent, and thus fixable and accountable. “There are different models for how to do this, but we essentially need a way to figure out which inputs are causing what,” he says. “It may involve classical data science methods that look for correlations. Or it may involve bigger neural nets, or neural nets with side tasks, so we can create data visualizations that would give you some insight into where the decision came from. Either way, it’s more work, and it’s very much an unsolved problem right now.”

At the end of the day, the question of what role AI should play in our lives may not be fundamentally different from the conversations we have anytime a potentially transformative technology emerges. Typically, that conversation involves a calculation of risks and benefits, and Rawashdeh thinks it’s still early enough for us to have thoughtful conversations about how and how quickly we want deep learning to shape our world. “Without question, there is a huge potential for AI, but it gets scary when you get into areas like autonomy or health care or national defense. You realize we have to get this right. For example, whenever I have a moment when I’m disconnected from the internet for a few days, I'm reminded just how different that reality is than the modern reality that’s shaped by social media or all the things we immerse ourselves in online. When the internet came into being, we just let it into our world, and in hindsight, we can see that came with certain risks. If we could turn back the clock 30 years, knowing what we know now, would we just let the internet loose on people? I think it’s a similar decision that we face now with AI.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Technology

Off

Mon, 03/06/2023 - 17:26

Artificial intelligence can do amazing things that humans can’t, but in many cases, we have no idea how AI systems make their decisions. ��-Dearborn Associate Professor Samir Rawashdeh explains why that’s a big deal.

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Illustrations by Nadia and Simple Line via Adobe Stock

Dania Bazzi’s American Dream

lblouin — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:10:27 +0000

Dania Bazzi’s American Dream lblouin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 14:10

Dania Bazzi’s family story is a reminder that the narrative of the American dream, however problematic, isn’t without roots in reality. In the late 1970s, Bazzi’s parents immigrated from Senegal to metro Detroit, where Mary and Al started a convenience store business in Wayne, a working class community in the inner ring of western suburbs. It wasn’t an easy life, though it was unquestionably a good one. Her parents worked a permanent schedule of 12-hour days with no days off, and Bazzi says at least one of them was at the store until they both retired. But it was never boring, nor were they ever lonely. “My parents’ store was almost like a neighborhood meeting place,” Bazzi says. “People would come and talk about their problems or have a cup of coffee. They saw my mother and father as confidants and friends, and that won them a lot of loyalty in a community where running a business wasn’t always easy.” That social currency no doubt served her father well when he later decided to go into local politics, first as a Wayne City Council member and later as the city’s mayor and Wayne County Commissioner. Bazzi and her siblings enlisted as his campaign door knockers to support their dad’s dreams, the way he’d done for them.

Bazzi says Mary and Al were always clear about the reason for moving to the U.S. Ensuring they’d have access to free, quality education was a ticket to giving their kids a more comfortable life, and ideally, one where each of them could pursue careers that fit their passions. Studying hard and getting good grades were taken for granted in their home, and there was never any question about whether Bazzi or her four siblings would go to college. She says it was an easy choice to follow in her two older sisters’ footsteps and enroll at ��-Dearborn, where the smaller class sizes and down-to-earth professors and staff made a shy kid feel safe.

To say Bazzi was a dedicated student is an understatement. Taking advantage of a block-tuition program that allowed students to take up to 18 credits per semester for the price of 12, she earned her bachelor’s in mathematics in three years. During that time, she basically lived on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., squeezing in study sessions between classes and surviving on Cottage Inn pizza at the U Mall, a forerunner of the University Center. During her final semester, she interviewed for and landed a job at Ford as a project management consultant, where she was tasked with wrangling white-collar engineers and blue-collar suppliers to make sure cars got built on time. “It’s funny to think about now, but there I was, a 21-year-old, on the phone, trying to get tough with suppliers, threatening that we’d find another supplier or that I’d be there on the due date to pick the parts up myself. And they’d be like, ‘Who is this?’”

Overall, it was a good job, with a good salary and health benefits, and Bazzi says she grew a lot, especially when it came to building professional relationships. But it wasn’t long before she started seriously considering a dream that had always been hanging out somewhere not quite in the back of her mind. She credited her public school teachers with giving her “belief in myself when I didn’t always have it” and had often felt inspired to follow in their footsteps. So while working full-time at Ford, Bazzi headed back to ��-Dearborn for a master’s program designed for working professionals like her who already had a bachelor’s in a teachable subject and wanted to make a pivot to education. Her memory of the program is that it was “robust.” When she hit her first in-classroom practicum, there was definitely part of her that wondered if she’d made the right choice. Even once she took her first job as a high school math teacher, the doubts didn’t disappear immediately. “I remember at the end of my first year, I was talking with my teaching partner who was next door, and I told her ‘I’m never coming back. I’m going back to Ford!’ I was semi-joking. Semi. But I was exhausted. And she literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Hey, go have a good summer, relax, but I’ll see you next door. After a week or two, you’ll be fine.’”

Her colleague was right. Every year, Bazzi says her confidence grew. She also got more excited about new methods for making math exciting for her students. Her classroom was noisy — in a good way — and she describes her style as a “warm demander,” a term she borrows from teacher educator Zaretta Hammond. Between bells, the expectations for participation were always high, but outside of class, students could come to her for anything. Those five years leading a classroom produced countless good memories. But Bazzi’s strong interest in pedagogy and curriculum innovation eventually led her to take an interview for a school improvement consultant in another district. When she got the formal offer, it was a hard decision to leave the classroom, but ultimately, she thought she’d have a broader impact helping teachers and districts develop exciting new practices. She loved the work, and after two years, it led to a curriculum development director gig at a district near Grand Rapids, a job which still ranks as her all-time favorite. “I basically was able to do all the fun stuff,” Bazzi says. “My job was to listen to the things that teachers or students or administrators needed help with and then figure out how we could do that at a high level. I had no direct reports, no evaluations. I just got to be the creative, fun person and help everybody.”

"I remember at the end of my first year, I was talking with my teaching partner who was next door, and I told her ‘I’m never coming back. I’m going back to Ford!’ I was semi-joking. Semi. But I was exhausted. And she literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Hey, go have a good summer, relax, but I’ll see you next door. After a week or two, you’ll be fine.'"

Given her passion for new ideas and now with some substantive administrative experience under her belt, a superintendent position was probably inevitable. Her first was at a rural district in west Michigan with barely a thousand students — an experience she still cherishes because of the skills you build in a place with an all-hands-on-deck culture. She talks about leading Ferndale schools, her next stop, the way a proud parent talks about their cool kid with an independent streak. Bazzi came in at a time when school choice was triggering enrollment and financial churn for metro Detroit districts, and under Bazzi’s leadership, Ferndale stabilized enrollment, improved achievement and passed a bond for a new lower elementary school. “Ferndale is a hidden jewel,” she says. “People don’t realize it, but it actually serves four different municipalities, so it’s a very diverse district. In many communities, people have lost connection with their local schools, but I think it’s a great example of what you can accomplish if people are willing to come together, and everybody’s rowing in the same direction.”

More recently, Bazzi has taken a new post, one which she expects will be a more permanent stop. As the superintendent of West Bloomfield School District, she’s again leading a community brimming with diversity and anxious for new ideas. Defying images of the ethnically homogenous outer suburbs, the schools serve large Jewish and Chaldean communities, African American students, who make up about 40 percent of enrollment, and numerous immigrant communities. In all, 61 languages are spoken in West Bloomfield schools. Bazzi says it’s also a district with a history of embracing new ways of doing things. Right now, that means pushing for more diversified learning opportunities, especially focused programs in the trades, career preparation and STEAM. It’s something that’s a big part of their messaging as they advocate for a new bond proposal, which will be in front of voters later this year. She says it makes it a little easier that another bond is expiring, so people will either see their taxes stay the same, if it passes, or go down a little, if the bond fails. Bazzi is hopeful that the community will choose to have strong schools at the heart of their community over a tax break.

Bazzi says West Bloomfield is indeed still one of those places where the schools feel like the center of gravity of community life. Even so, she’s not taking that ethos for granted. Bazzi says she mostly tries to stay out of politics, but her positions are pretty firm when it comes to some of the issues that have recently divided communities and eroded faith in public schools. “To me, and to my parents, our public schools were always one of the things that felt very special about this country,” Bazzi says. “It was a collective commitment that a free, quality education was something every child needed and deserved. I’d be disappointed to see us lose that. I see parents chasing the ‘best-rated’ schools, or being wary, whether consciously or unconsciously, of districts that serve students with lower socioeconomic status or that may be going through troublesome times. But I wish people understood this kind of diversity is part of what makes a school strong. Your child isn’t going to lose out on anything because they sit next to a kid who has different circumstances. They’re going to gain from that. I see it all the time. Our schools are here to ensure that some baseline level of equity in our world can exist. They are not the whole solution, but if we abandon ship on our public schools, I don’t see how this helps anyone. The world is diverse. The world is complex. And I think we’re all better off when we face it together.”

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Story by Lou Blouin