Carolina’s inaugural AI for Public Good conference on April 13 is just one way UNC-Chapel Hill is helping to lead the conversation about how universities should teach, study and responsibly use artificial intelligence. Here are two other recent examples led by UNC Global Affairs: an international workshop on ethics in Germany and a national workshop on the role of AI in global education.
International AI ethics conference
On March 3-4, the Parr Center for Ethics at UNC-Chapel Hill collaborated with the International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen — one of Carolina’s global partner universities — to host an international workshop for AI, ethics and education.
Researchers from the Parr Center and the Tübingen ethics center discussed how moral reasoning, philosophical inquiry and science can help address the social and educational challenges posed by AI.
“Our hope was to use this workshop as a springboard to launch [more] collaborations centered on research, teaching and public-facing ethics education,” said Michael Vazquez, associate director of the Parr Center.
Since 2022, Tübingen ethics center researchers have developed four collaborative research projects with Carolina faculty to examine how teaching data science and technology can be grounded in social and human contexts, including this workshop — supported by a Global Partnership Award from UNC Global Affairs— and three projects supported by the UNC-Tübingen joint seed fund for research collaborations.
“The [UNC-Tubingen] partnership has been able to grow because of faculty collaborations,” said Melissa McMurray, associate director for global partnerships in UNC Global Affairs. “This workshop helped bring together scholars around campus [and around the world] who are interested in grappling with similar questions and building on complementary institutional research strengths.”
AI in global education
In January, three UNC Global Affairs representatives attended the American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting in Washington, D.C., contributed to a broader conversation about the role of AI in global education.
Sharmila Udyavar, associate director for global education, and Emmy Grace, program manager for global education, gave a presentation about how the Carolina Diplomacy Fellows program prepares students for global careers.
Emerging technologies such as AI are affecting everything, including the field of international affairs, and through Diplomatic Discussions, the Diplomacy Lab and other programming, fellows have begun exploring how AI can improve, or hinder, global governance, information flows and international cooperation.
Neil Gaikwad, founding director of the Society-Centered AI Lab, spoke about his experience with the Diplomacy Lab. He is an assistant professor in the UNC School of Data Science and Society and the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ computer science department.
In Gaikwad’s Diplomacy Lab course, students help diplomats tackle complicated problems, including building AI applications to use in sustainability and climate policy. Students designed, built and trained AI systems that forced ethical considerations into their discussions and decisions, such as whose water rights to prioritize, what ecological knowledge to include and which definition of food security to use.
“In most cases, either societal context is an afterthought bolted onto technical AI training, or technical context is an afterthought in courses that discuss ethics abstractly. Neither teaches the trade-offs,” Gaikwad said. “When you start with the human considerations, the trade-offs are immediate and unavoidable.”
Through conference presentations, international partnerships and interdisciplinary coursework, faculty and staff are exploring how AI can be ethically integrated into a Carolina education.
“This University seeks to become an engine defining public AI,” said Barbara Stephenson, vice provost for global affairs and chief global officer. “This means Carolina is leading conversations and convening critical thinkers around a set of important questions about the use of AI: How do we use it to improve society? How can AI be a tool for public good?”
