Joe Cruz is chair of the Department of Philosophy and a founding faculty member and chair of the Cognitive Science Program at Williams College. He received a joint Phd in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from the University of Arizona in 1999, where he worked at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. His current interdisciplinary work spans topics in epistemology, computational approaches to cognition, and the methodological foundations of cognitive science. Throughout, Joe aims to incorporate insights from humanistic learning such as literature, photography, and art, and he has collaborated extensively with the Williams College Museum of Art on exhibitions related to his scholarship. He is the co-author (with John Pollock) of Contemporary Theories of Knowledge as well as numerous articles in journals that include Mind and Language, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. Joe grew up in Brooklyn, New York as part of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and is the first person in his family to go to college.
Stacy A. Doore is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She received her Ph.D. in Spatial Information Science and Engineering at the University of Maine. Stacy is the founder of the INSITE Lab, a research lab focusing on emerging assistive technologies including mixed reality, robotics, and artificial intelligence to help people gain access to better spatial information for exploring multi-scale environments. Her current research explores multimodal interfaces for navigation, art exploration, and educational applications, using virtual environments to study spatial reasoning in educational and industry settings, and the development of human-robot navigation assistants for people with vision loss. This interdisciplinary work partners with colleagues in digital and computational studies, philosophy, arts and cinema studies, environmental science, and psychology.
At Colby College, Stacy teaches courses in Introduction to Computational Thinking, Advanced Databases, and Computing, Ethics, and Society. She is a member of the Autonomous Vehicle Research group, co-creator of the Computing Ethics Narratives project funded by the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge (RCC), and a member of the ACM Ethics in Computing Education Task Force. Stacy currently serves as the chair of the Mozilla RCC alumni group. Her research has been supported by NSF, NIH, U.S. DOT as well as the Luce Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Google Foundation.
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, editor of Critical AI, and chair of the Critical AI @ Rutgers. As well as a board member for the Rutgers British Studies Center, she serves on the University’s Advisory Council on AI (and was the lead author for its “living document,” Advice for the New Semester) and on its committee for CASS (Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, & Society). Her grant-related research in the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical AI studies and the teaching of critical AI literacies include an NEH international grant ("Unboxing AI') to create workshops and other programming in collaboration with partners at the Australian National University, DESIGN JUSTICE AI (a Global Humanities Institute at the University of Pretoria in July 2024), and DESIGN JUSTICE LABS (an NEH grant for the creation of a shared digital infrastructure for student- and community-centered teaching about and research on "generative AI").
Goodlad's published writing in critical AI studies includes the editor's introduction to Critical AI, "Humanities in the Loop"; the introduction to the journal’s first issue, DATA WORLDS, (co-authored with Katherine Bode); and "Now the Humanities Can Disrupt 'AI'" (co-authored with Sam Baker). She is the co-editor with Matthew Stone (Computer Science) of the forthcoming two-part special issue of Critical AI on Large Language Models, Generative AI, and the Rise of Chatbots (the first part of which is due out in Spring 2024).
Héctor Vila, is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College, with extensive experience in experiential learning, student cohort-building, and academic inquiry into inequality to this role. His book, Life Affirming Acts, Education as Transformation in the Writing Classroom (Heinemann/ Boynton-Cook) addresses the tension between race and gender, class, and the education system. An early adapter of technology in the Humanities he joined the Mellon Foundation funded Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College. In 2008, he was the only non-tech humanist, to speak at the MIT OpeniWorld Conference in, Lyon, France, on The Location of Technology, a Theory of the Present. His book article, “Digital Stories in the Liberal Arts Environment: Educational Media Communities at the Margins,” with Barbara Ganley, in Media Communities, Brigitte Hipfl, Theo Hug, ed. (Waxmann, Berlin and New York), also a talk at MIT’s Media Lab, demonstrates how digital media can break down harsh boundaries between students and education. He’s involved in a long-term digital project in his Social Class and the Environment course where each year students contribute to a SCALAR digital text. Further essays on education, marginalization, and identity are published by the Community Works Journal. Of interest may be, Degrees of Separation: Helping Students Find Safe Spaces for Thinking and Being, Star Wars Civilization and Stone Age Emotions, Who Owns the Academic Body in the ‘Pandemic University’, and Reflecting With Students. The Ecology of Teaching is an interview about service learning, particularly at Middlebury College.