Brown University doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar is the friend people turn to when they need to talk.
“My family jokes that I’m the ‘therapist friend’ everyone calls when they have a problem,” Iftikhar said.
Her capacity for caregiving has informed her research at Brown, where she is focused on exploring technology’s therapeutic strengths and weaknesses to find ways people can best use AI to support social and mental health. Her research has spotlighted humans’ inherent ability to offer and detect empathy, which is something that chatbots, text-based therapists and other artificial intelligence systems don’t do well, she said.
Will artificial intelligence cure disease or hasten environmental disaster, free us from drudgery or drown us in slop? What’s next for AI, and what role does Brown have to play? With nuance, in depth, with a bit of humor and without a lot of hype, Michael Littman would like to tell you all about it.
Our new issue is here! This year's cover story takes a look at the future of AI at Brown and beyond with Michael Littman, Brown's inaugural Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, as your guide. Other stories highlight student research and entrepreneurship, including responsible AI, a visit to a startup school, and an online game that explores our understanding of language. Finally, we offer detailed retrospectives as we bid farewell to Kathy Kirman Billings, Tom Doeppner, Steve Reiss, Don Stanford, and Stan Zdonik. Best wishes for a healthy and happy holiday season!
Brown CS faculty members Serena Booth and Suresh Venkatasubramanian have just been appointed to co-chair the AI and Algorithms Subcommittee, whose recent work includes responses to government RFIs, techbriefs, and statements on chatbot use.
ARIA, a Brown-based research consortium supported by a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation, welcomed scientists from across the U.S. to kick off a five-year program with a launch event in Providence.
Brown CS is again partnering with Google Research to offer exploreCSR: Socially-Responsible Artificial Intelligence, a semester-long immersive research experience program for undergraduate students.
The chatbots routinely violated core mental health ethics standards, underscoring the need for legal standards and oversight.
Brown CS PhD student Tassallah Amina Abdullahi has received the Best Social Impact Paper award at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), one of the premier international conferences in natural language processing. Her paper, "AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset", was co-written with several colleagues from institutions such as Georgia Tech, Ohio State University, Masakhane, Kenyatta University, McGill University, and Google Research.
In a new article, The Brown Daily Herald talks to Brown CS faculty member Ellie Pavlick about Brown's new AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA), funded by a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study human-artificial intelligence interactions and mental health.
The program, first of its kind worldwide, aims to enable these young scientists to conduct high-quality, policy-informed AI research, to empower them to advocate for new AI policies or changes to existing policy, and to build a pipeline of qualified technologists to fill emerging needs in government.
