Skip to content
Main Menu
Campus Links

One-U RAI Partners with Humanities AI Summer Institute to Host Distinguished Visitors

The University of Utah One-U Responsible AI Initiative (One-U RAI) will sponsor two distinguished visitors, Deanna Holroyd and Parisa M. Setayesh, as part of the July 14–25 Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence Summer Institute. The institute brings together 30 accomplished humanities faculty from across the country, chosen from a highly competitive pool of 120 applicants working at the intersection of AI, culture, policy, and ethics. Setayesh and Holroyd will engage with faculty and students over the course of their two-week residency. Their visit will culminate with a responsible AI panel on July 25 at 10 am in the Marriott Library Digital Matters Lab. Panel details, including a link to attend virtually, will be shared here on the One-U RAI website closer to the event date.

Deanna Holroyd

Assistant Professor at Akita International University, Japan
Thematic Area: Healthcare and Wellness

Holroyd is an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher whose doctoral dissertation, completed this year at The Ohio State University, examines how media technologies—such as social media platforms, diagnostic and treatment apps, video games, and generative AI—shape how we know, diagnose, and care for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the U.S. She also looks at this issue broadly—how these technologies shape medical knowledge and practices. Her future research goals include examining how users engage with AI technologies to help them care for their mental health, and how AI-powered healthcare tools are viewed as solutions by healthcare and tech workers as well as consumers. She brings a broader knowledge of AI’s role in the humanities and higher education through her participation in several other institutes, and through her experience training others on integrating AI into the classroom.

Parisa M. Setayesh

Doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography) at the City University of New York Graduate Center
Thematic Area:​ Environment

As a human geographer and political ecologist, Setayesh’s work focuses on how society uses technology like AI tools to adapt to climate change and pursue environmental justice. Her dissertation looks at flood risk management, examining how infrastructure and governance shape urban resilience. She’s also interested in the politics of technology—how digital tools like those powered by AI can (or can’t) be used to help communities navigate climate risk, access environmental data, and influence policy decisions. AI can potentially democratize climate knowledge and improve public engagement with environmental challenges, but it also risks reinforcing power imbalances, data biases, and exclusionary decision-making. If AI is going to be used in climate work, it has to be done with communities, not for them. That’s a central question Setayesh wants to bring to the institute: How do we design AI tools for climate adaptation that are actually useful, inclusive, and accountable?

Each year, One-U RAI invites up to five distinguished visitors from academia, government, or industry to the University of Utah to stimulate discussion and future research around responsible AI. Read more about distinguished visitors.