In a packed auditorium at the recently opened Amy Gutmann Hall in April, Penn community members gathered to formally launch the Penn AI Initiative and Penn’s role during this technological inflection point. (Pictured from left) Bhuvnesh Jain, Marylyn Ritchie, Dawn Bonnell, René Vidal, Duncan Watts, and Lynn Wu.
And all the while, Penn’s students—across schools—delivered on the promise of AI through various projects. Penn Today captured these projects in a spring profile series.
Helen Jin, a doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Davis Brown, also a doctoral student in Penn Engineering, worked with Eric Wong, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science, to research large language models (LLM) for cyberbullying capabilities. The work profiles individual models for strengths and weaknesses, offering debug solutions. “If we can find a way to best quantify how these cyberbullying generations can happen and how we can mitigate them in the future,” Jin says, “I think that can really save people’s lives.”
In collaboration with Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor George Demiris and Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy Connie M. Ulrich, School of Nursing Ph.D. student Oonjee Oh, inspired by her work with patients as a nurse on a general surgery unit in South Korea, was the lead author on a paper published in the journal Nursing Ethics that applies moral principles to explore the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence in palliative care. Ulrich says Oh’s paper “encourages us to consider both the benefits and challenges of using AI in supportive care for patients and families. These include the importance of autonomy and personal decision-making, the possibility of distress from using AI, biases in algorithms, and treatment predictions, among other concerns.”
Helen Jin and Davis Brown.
Working with Professor of Learning, Teaching, and Literacies Ryan Baker in the Graduate School of Education, Rachel Liu, a first-year doctoral candidate in Penn GSE, helped to develop “JeepyTA” as an AI teaching assistant tool. The chatbot tool, currently being used by several instructors in GSE and elsewhere, supports students and instructors by not only answering questions about the syllabus but by offering formative feedback—feedback that “helps students think about things,” says Baker.
Derek Gibbs, an MBA student at the Wharton School and vice president of innovation of the Wharton AI & Analytics Club, created a prediction algorithm that uses AI to help MBA students forecast their class schedules. The tool uses historical data to estimate the likelihood of receiving specific courses based on students’ expressed utilities. Gibbs worked with Gérard Cachon, a professor of marketing and a professor of operations information and decisions, as an adviser to an independent study in which Gibbs explored the prediction algorithm concept. “My goal would be for no one to get a schedule that they don’t want,” Gibbs says.
(From left) Derek Gibbs, Jessica Mach, and Eileen Feng.
A collaboration between the School of Social Policy and Practice (SP2), Penn Nursing, and Penn Engineering, Integrated Product Design master’s student Eileen Feng is working with Creative Resilient Youth, a youth-led mental health advocacy and creative arts initiative for teens in Philadelphia, to create a tool that provides youth a space to discuss their feelings, with the help of prompts, and empowers them to create art with the aid of personalized recommendations from the tool. “When it comes to creative arts, [AI] is generating a lot of artworks that come from someone else, but it’s not really facilitating the creative arts ‘process,’ so the process gap is there and it’s about creating a process where the AI can assist for the healing,” says Siva Mathiyazhagan, a research assistant professor in SP2 and PI of the project. “When the AI and then the human brain are processing this together, what kind of healing happens?”
Artificial intelligence touches disciplines across campus. To learn more about how members of the Penn community are pioneering the understanding and advancement of AI, visit the Penn AI website.
Rashi Sabherwal, a doctoral student in political science, explores how women engage politically in society in informal roles through her research in India.
Applying design to agriculture for a new approach to agroforestry
Penn researchers are leading a multidisciplinary land-use project that blends trees, livestock, and streamside buffers to turn New Bolton Center into a living lab for stewardship agriculture.
Helping robots work together to explore the Moon and Mars
Penn Engineers, NASA, and five other universities tested robotic systems designed to help unmanned explorers cooperate in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, paving the way for Moon and Mars exploration.
