Launching AI labs

Many colleges and universities are launching labs and research centers dedicated to AI ethics and research, such as the University of Notre Dame, which last year partnered with IBM on an ethics lab. Syracuse University in 2019 announced an AI policy and ethics research center. The University of Rhode Island launched a lab in its library in 2018. Though not specifically dedicated to AI ethics, Karim Boughida, Dean of University Libraries at URI told Edscoop that hosting the lab in the library is intended to prompt a broader discussion across disciplines about AI. “You’re not here just to program, you have to be aware of your biases, the biases of others and the biases in the data,” he told EdScoop. “Many people who are engineers say, ‘Oh, that’s not my problem, I just program.’”