Critical AI Studies

Students explore fundamental questions such as, “What is meant by the term ‘artificial intelligence’? How is this similar to and different from our understanding of human intelligence and creativity? How do AI systems actually function?” Students also probe how social and historical factors shape the underlying theories, concepts, technologies, development pipelines, and policies that support AI systems as we know them.  

Taught by

Michael McCarrin, Nicholas Anderman

This course provides a survey of critical theory tradition of thought beginning from the influential critiques of the Enlightenment by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and extending to the twentieth century critical theories of the Frankfurt School, with a focus on the writings of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. The course will trace the shifts within critical theory’s long odyssey, while interrogating the possibilities and limits of this tradition today. 

Taught by

Arwa Awan

The growth and use of data is increasingly vital for many disciplines, from natural sciences to social sciences, and business to humanities. This course introduces students to data science and informatics that study how to collect, manage, process, analyze, and visualize data from a computational perspective. Topics include computational thinking, understanding different types of data, database techniques, and a variety of data analysis approaches. 

Taught by

Joshua H. Davidson ’12

Energy issues are often characterized as problems we can ‘supply’ our way out of by changing the resources we rely on, and less frequently as a problem of consumption. This course adopts a socio-technical perspective. The first part of this course explores physical, political, and economic aspects of energy supply through the examination of different energy sources (biomass, fossil fuels, electricity, renewables, nuclear). The second part of the course addresses social and political aspects of energy consumption.

Taught by

Paul Brehm

Can a poem change based on your weather data? What happens when a story moves nonlinearly through hyperlinks, or when the computer becomes your collaborator? This creative writing course explores new media writing-poems, stories, and hybrid works that use digital media to create innovative literary experiences. Our scope may include interactive fiction, video games, computational poetry, audio and video poems, hybrid installations, immersive storytelling, and more. Students will workshop their creative work with peers.

Taught by

Amanda Hodes

This course explores fundamental questions in the field of cognition such as, “How are we able to learn languages, make decisions, and predict the future?” It covers a variety of topics relating to the scientific study of high-level human cognition, including thinking, problem solving, language, and reasoning. 

Taught by

Manasi Jayakumar