As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, educators are rapidly being presented with opportunities and challenges for which they are largely unprepared. The release of ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, caught many educators off-guard, and more powerful iterations of generative AI language technologies are expected to follow soon. With the ability to understand natural language and respond in real-time, generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach assessments and learning.
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto are co-hosting a symposium that will bring together leading researchers, educators, and technologists to explore the future of education and assessment in the age of generative AI. Through a series of presentations and a panel discussion, this event will examine the implications of these new technologies for how educators approach assessments and promote learning in a variety of contexts.
Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the potential of generative AI in education and how these changes push us to re-examine the meaning and value of learning. Participants will also have the opportunity to engage in thoughtful discussions and exchange ideas with other professionals in the field.
Join us for this exciting event and be part of the conversation about the future of education in the era of generative AI. Registration is free and open to all.
Speakers:
Lauren Bialystok (moderator), associate professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Elliot Creager, PhD candidate, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto.
Ryan Fics, independent writer, teacher, and curriculum developer.
Avery Slater, assistant professor, Department of English, University of Toronto.
Karina Vold, assistant professor, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto.
Venue:
Nexus Lounge, 12th floor of OISE, 252 Bloor St. West, right above St. George subway (map).
About the speakers
Lauren Bialystok is an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the Department of Social Justice Education, a faculty associate at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre de Recherches en Education Franco-Ontarienne, and acting director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. Her areas of expertise are ethics and education, identity, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, and women's health and sexuality. Bialystok works with students whose areas of inquiry include gender and queer theory, sex education, philosophy of education, and identity in education.
Elliot Creager is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and a graduate affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Creager’s research focuses on how machine learning methods fail, and what can be done to improve their robustness in new contexts, drawing on technical approaches such as representation learning, causal inference, and data augmentation to build models for prediction and control that generalize beyond the available training data. He is also interested in the broader implications of using machine learning to automate decisions, especially the tendency of this process to codify and compound existing social inequities.
Ryan Fics has a Bachelor of Arts (honours) and a Joint Master of Arts in Religious Studies from the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University. Fics has taught a broad variety of courses in the humanities, including courses on Classical Literature, Antiquity, Political Philosophy, Animal Studies, Posthumanism, and Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manitoba, Emory University, and Wesleyan University. Currently, he is a private high school teacher and continues to regularly attend national and international conferences. He has published articles and interviews in peer-reviewed journals such as Mosaic: An interdisciplinary critical journal and book chapters in presses such as Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working on a book about animal ethics, AI, and climate change.
Avery Slater is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and a research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Her research investigates the re-conceptualization of human and nonhuman forms of language following the rise of information and computational technologies, with specific attention to the history of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her book project Apparatus Poetics explores how mid-twentieth-century poets revise and reinvent modernist theories of poetic process in response to emerging technologies of language (computation, artificial intelligence, machine translation, information theory). She has also held fellowships from the Society for the Humanities (Cornell) and the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared in New Literary History, IEEE, Symplokē, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cultural Critique, American Literature, Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture, and Technology, Amodern, and in edited collections Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke UP), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford UP), A Companion to American Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell), Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization (Routledge), and The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science.
Karina Vold is a philosopher of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and a research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She received her PhD in philosophy from McGill University. Before joining U of T, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. In her recent work, Vold has written on the implications of theories of extended cognition, responsible innovation in online therapy, and the capabilities and risks of AI. Her current projects include researching the effects of AI on human cognition and autonomy, understanding the harms arising from targeted online “nudging,” evaluating arguments for existential threats from AI, and building frameworks for the ethical design of AI systems.
About the Schwartz Reisman Institute
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society is a research institute located at the University of Toronto whose mission is to deepen our knowledge of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human by integrating research across traditional boundaries and building human-centred solutions that really make a difference. The integrative research we conduct rethinks technology’s role in society, the contemporary needs of human communities, and the systems that govern them. We’re investigating how best to align technology with human values and deploy it accordingly. The human-centred solutions we build are actionable and practical, highlighting the potential of emerging technologies to serve the public good while protecting citizens and societies from their misuse. We want to make sure powerful technologies truly make the world a better place—for everyone.
About the Centre for Ethics
The Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, where conversations about ethics happen, sits at the interface between academic research and public discourse. An interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined, the Centre for Ethics seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.
