Skip to content
Main Menu
Campus Links
Inaugural Symposium graphic

About the Symposium

This daylong event gave University of Utah community members a chance to connect around the One-U Responsible AI Initiative. We shared progress in three thematic areas—environment, healthcare and wellness, and teaching and learning. Attendees had opportunities to engage with responsible AI experts, including U researchers and local and national partners.

Watch the Symposium on YouTube

Symposium Program

  • 8:30-9:15 – Registration and Breakfast
  • 9:15-9:30 – Introduction and Welcome: Mitzi Montoya, Provost and SVPAA
  • 9:30-9:45 – One-U RAI Updates: Manish Parashar, Presidential Professor and SCI Institute Director
  • 9:45-10:45 – Framing and Taming AI Risks: Elham Tabassi, Chief AI Advisor at NIST
  • 10:55-11:45 – Panel Discussion: Public-Private Partnerships
  • 11:45-12:45 – Lunch and Networking
  • 12:45-1:35 – Responsible AI x Environment
  • 1:45-2:35 – Responsible AI x Healthcare and Wellness
  • 2:45-3:35 – Responsible AI x Teaching and Learning
  • 3:45-4:35 – Panel Discussion: Realizing the Promise of AI
  • 4:35-5:00 – Next Steps and Closing Remarks: Manish Parashar, Presidential Professor and SCI Institute Director

View Program PDF

Keynote Presentation: Framing and Taming AI Risks

Elham Tabassi

Chief AI Advisor and Associate Director for Emerging Technologies Information Technology Laboratory at National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)

Elham Tabassi leads NIST’s AI Innovation Lab that aims to cultivate trust in the design, development, and use of AI technologies by improving measurement science, standards, and related tools in ways that enhance economic security and improve quality of life.

She has been working on various machine learning and computer vision research projects with applications in biometrics evaluation and standards since she joined NIST in 1999. Tabassi is the principal architect of NIST Fingerprint Image Quality (NFIQ), an international standard for measuring fingerprint image quality which has been deployed in many largescale biometric applications worldwide. Among her other roles at NIST, Tabassi has served as ITL Chief of Staff.

She serves as the US Government’s AI Standards Coordinator, has been a member of the National AI Resource Research Task Force, a senior member of IEEE, and a fellow of Washington Academy of Sciences. In September 2023, Tabassi was named by TIME magazine as one of the "100 Most Influential People in AI.”

Responsible AI x Environment

One-U RAI Environment Priorities
Bill Anderegg, Director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy and Associate Professor of Biology
AI and Misinformation
Isabelle Freiling, Faculty Affiliate at the Global Change and Sustainability Center and Assistant Professor of Communication
AI and Wildfire Forecasting
Derek Mallia, Research Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences

Responsible AI x Healthcare and Wellness

One-U RAI Healthcare and Wellness Priorities
Nina de Lacy, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and at the Kahlert School of Computing
AI and The Holy Grail of Obstetric Decision Making
Nathan Blue, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics And Gynecology and Population Health Sciences
Enhancing Safety and Precision in Automated Anatomy Evaluation
Shireen Elhabian, Associate Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing

Responsible AI x Teaching and Learning

One-U RAI Teaching and Learning Priorities
Andrea Rorrer, Director of Utah Education Policy Center and Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy
AI's role in Learning: Enabler or Impediment
Rohit Aggarwal, Professor of Operations and Information Systems
Supporting Faculty and Student Success with Advances in AI
Anne Cook, Director of Martha Bradley Evans Center for Teaching Excellence and Professor of Educational Psychology

Public-Private Partnerships

Local and national experts share their experiences in public-private partnerships in responsible AI

Moderator: Bassam Salem
Founder, Mindshare Ventures & AtlasRTX
Anthony Annunziata
Director of AI Open Innovation at IBM
Greg Jones
Director of Product Management NVIDIA Maxine AI Developer Platform
Marissa Saunders
Senior Director of Data Science at Recursion
BJ Vander Linden
CIO at The Larry H. Miller Company

Realizing the Promise of AI

A discussion on local, national, and international perspectives around access, equity, and ethics of AI

Moderator: Manish Parashar
Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute and Presidential Professor at the Kahlert School of Computing
Margaret Woolley Busse
Executive Director at Utah Department of Commerce
David Danks
Professor of Data Science, Philosophy, & Policy at UC San Diego
Susan Gregurick
Associate Director of Data Science and Director of the Office of Data Science Strategy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Nicholas Tatonetti
Vice Chair of Operations in Computational Biomedicine, Associate Director of Computational Oncology at the Cancer Institute, and Professor of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

One thought on “Sept. 23: One-U RAI Inaugural Symposium”

  1. Pingback: Symposium marks 1 year of the Responsible AI Initiative: ‘Just the Beginning’ – @theU

Comments are closed.