AI and Society

AI and Society: Community Impacts and New Directions

Friday-Saturday, June 27-28, 2025

Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club*
1 W. Dayton, Madison, WI 53703

Please contact workshop organizers if the registration fee creates a financial burden or to address concerns about your participation in the workshop.

This interactive workshop offers a comprehensive exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) and its wide-reaching impact across various sectors, with a focus on how these advancements intersect with education, ethics, and community well-being. As AI rapidly reshapes industries from healthcare to journalism and the arts, it’s important for educators, community organizations, and local businesses to consider how these changes affect long-term resilience and everyday life in communities across Wisconsin.

A limited number of complimentary hotel rooms are still available for Friday, June 27th at the Concourse Hotel. Attendees must live at least ONE HOUR from Madison to be considered.
All meals are included in your $30 registration fee including a special group dinner on Friday evening at a TBA restaurant on State Street in Madison.
Attendees will also receive a FREE copy of Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford.

Sessions will explore key areas such as:

AI and Society: Investigating bias, privacy concerns, and the broader social impacts of AI systems.
AI in Education: Practical applications and challenges in integrating AI tools into K-14 classrooms, and how AI is shaping the future of learning.
Sustainability and AI: Examining the environmental footprint of AI technologies and exploring opportunities for sustainable tech practices.
AI in Healthcare: Innovations in AI that are transforming healthcare, improving patient outcomes, and shaping the future of health care systems.
AI in the Arts and Journalism: How AI is influencing creative industries and media, with a focus on creative process, authenticity, and innovation.
Business Integration: A deeper look at the ways AI drives business practices at the local and global levels, and how AI impacts global economies.

Our goal is to engage educators, business leaders, and community partners in meaningful conversations. This workshop offers tools, knowledge, and a network of experts to explore how AI can be used responsibly and effectively in education, business, and beyond.

Co-sponsored by the Latin America, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, the Institute for Regional and International Studies National Resource Center, European Studies, and the Center for South Asia.

Sessions are still being finalized. All details are subject to change. All sessions held in the Assembly Room at the Concourse Hotel.

Friday, June 27

8:30am	Registration and Breakfast	coffee, tea, pastries and fruit
9:00am	Teaching with AI: Strategies, Skepticism, and Tools	Laura Grossenbacher
10:15am	Break	coffee, tea, pastries and fruit
10:30am	Holding AI Accountable: The Role of Journalism and Education	Donnalie Jamnah
11:30am	Lunch	Menu TBA
1:00pm	Synthesizing Approaches with School of Education Faculty	Aaron Adan Aguilar, Shamya Karumbaiah, and David Williamson Shaffer
2:00pm	Break	coffee, tea, chocolate covered strawberries
2:15pm	Journalism, Writing, and the Ethics of AI	Emily Hall, Srijan Pandey, and Devansh Saxena
3:30pm	Final Discussions and Wrap-Up Day 1

Saturday, June 28

8:30am	Registration and Breakfast	coffee, tea, pastries and fruit
9:00am	Designing for Survival: AI and Environmental Resilience	James Crall and Rogers Jeffrey Leo John
10:15am	Break	coffee, tea, pastries and fruit
10:30am	Realizing the AI Dividend: Innovation and Impact in Global Business	Rogers Jeffrey Leo John, John Surdyk, and Sachin Tuli
11:30am	Lunch	Menu TBA
1:00pm	Between the Lines: How AI Shapes Understanding in Health Communication	Catalina Toma
2:00pm	Break	coffee, tea, cookies and dessert bars
2:15pm	Whose Story Is It?: AI, Imagination, and the Politics of Creative Production	Aaron Greer
3:30pm	Final Discussions and Wrap-Up Day 2

Aaron Adan Aguilar is a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Educational Policy Studies. He studies how digital data and ed-tech platforms shape teacher thinking, values, and work. Aaron is originally from Texas where he worked as a public school teacher for nearly a decade.

James Crall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology in CALS, where he joined the faculty in 2021 after completing his PhD at Harvard University. He studies the behavior and biodiversity of insects and their importance for ecosystem services that support human wellbeing. He develops technologies that use computer vision and AI to better understand the biology, ecology, and health of native bees (including bumblebees) and support effective management solutions to support pollinator biodiversity and the delivery of crop pollination services in agriculture.

Aaron Greer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. He teaches media production in the Department of Communication Arts and has directed fiction features, documentaries, music videos, podcasts, and a web series pilot.

He received his MFA from Temple University and as a filmmaker, Greer directed and produced the award-winning feature films, Service to Man and Gettin’ Grown. Both films have screened at festivals around the world and are distributed commercially. Greer also co-authored the award-winning screenplay Fruit of the Tree, about the only known survivor of a lynching. The screenplay was selected for the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival’s All-Access program. In addition to his feature work, Greer has produced a number of documentary and short films, with a particular interest in performing artists. He was also a co-founder of In/Motion, Chicago’s International Dance Film Festival and the Wisconsin Screenwriters’ Symposium. Greer has over 20 years of teaching experience, designing and leading courses in directing, screenwriting, editing and African-American cinema.

Laura Grossenbacher is Director of Undergraduate Program Review and Director of the Technical Communication Program in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and has been teaching courses in engineering communication and ethics for over 20 years. Her program is focused on teaching communication skills and ethics to engineering students at UW-Madison, thus it has been important for her and her colleagues to understand the strengths and the challenges of GenAI. Engineering students understand the promise of these technologies, but not always the perils. My plan is to discuss what we do to educate them using some of these tools, while ensuring that their education is not compromised by a reliance on these tools.

Emily Hall is distinguished teaching professor at the university of Wisconsin-Madison, director of Writing Across the Curriculum and director of the undergraduate Writing Fellows program. She holds a PhD in English from UW-Madison. Her current research focuses on teaching and tutoring writing and technology. She has an article on Generative AI and Technologies of Surveillance coming out in the next month in CriticalAI, an interdisciplinary journal published by Duke University Press; and an article with Sarah Z. Johnson on Navigating Generative AI Technologies through Cross-Institutional Partnerships which will be published in the edited volume, AI and Writing Program Administration, in late 2025.

Donnalie Wilson stands in front of a rush rural landscape.

Donnalie Jamnah is a Senior Education Program Manager for the Pulitzer Center’s education team. They manage several programs including the 1619 Educator Network. DJ joined the Pulitzer Center team in 2021 after years working as an instructional coach for teachers in K-12 classrooms. Prior to instructional coaching, DJ taught 10th grade English Language Arts. DJ has a Masters in Educational Technology from University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and two Bachelors degrees in Psychology and Creative Writing from Columbia University in the City of New York. They are passionate about any work that is creative, purposeful, and committed to the pursuit of equity.

Rogers Jeffrey Leo John is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of DataChat, a UW–Madison spin-out that lets anyone “chat” their way from raw data to insight. He has authored peer-reviewed work in ACM SIGMOD, SIGCSE and MICCAI, and holds multiple U.S. patents on conversational analytics interfaces. Rogers’ research has attracted NSF and U.S. Air Force SBIR funding, while propelling DataChat onto Gartner’s key Gen-AI startups and Tech Tribune’s “Best Tech Startups in Wisconsin” list.

Shamya Karumbaiah is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Area in Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Karumbaiah studies human-centered AI for teaching and learning with the aim to augment human intelligence. Her current research focuses on constructing a scientific and critical understanding of equitable and responsible use of AI in classrooms. After being a computer scientist for over ten years, she earned a PhD in learning sciences from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation empirically investigated sources of biases in AI-based learning systems. Before joining UW-Madison, she spent a year as a postdoc fellow at Carnegie Mellon University where she studied ways to augment teacher practices in human-AI partnered instruction.

Srijan (Sri) Pandey (any pronouns) is a doctoral researcher in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pursuing a minor in Design and Gender Studies. Their work sits at the intersection of human–AI interaction, critical data and AI ethics, and justice through care and community engagement. Srijan’s research interrogates how algorithmic socio-technical systems mediate the lived experiences of marginalized communities, particularly in Global South contexts, and explores how participatory and feminist methodologies can reconfigure these systems toward more equitable and accountable futures. Their scholarship builds on design justice, queer technologies, feminist technoscience, and data feminism, centering collective liberation and the lived experiences of the marginalized through a desire-centered approach that foregrounds care, sustainability, and intersectional justice as essential to reimagining policy and infrastructural governance.

They hold an undergraduate degree in Interaction Design from Delhi Technological University and bring professional experience as a UX researcher in the tech industry. Their praxis is rooted in feminist epistemologies and community-engaged methods that challenge dominant paradigms of knowledge production. Beyond academia, Srijan is actively engaged in spaces of collective expression and political resistance, and draws creative sustenance from live music, dance, visual art, and grassroots activism.

Devansh Saxena is an Assistant Professor in the Information School.

He studies sociotechnical practices of decision-making in high-stakes domains and the social impacts of introducing AI in such domains. He combines computational and design methods to deeply explore the decision-making space and design systems that augment workers’ practices. His research examines how human-AI interaction plays out in practice where decisions are mediated by organizational constraints, nuances of professional practice, and algorithmic decision-making. He is interested in developing new methods and tools that support AI innovation at the earliest stages of ideation, problem formulation, and project selection.

He is a mixed-methods researcher and his work is driven by Human-Centered Data Science. He continually finds himself at the intersection of human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and FAccT (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Sociotechnical Systems). He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University where he was co-advised by Dr. Shion Guha and Dr. Michael Zimmer in the Social and Ethical Computing Research Lab.

John Surdyk is a teaching faculty member at the Wisconsin School of Business and Director of the Initiative for Studies in Transformational Entrepreneurship (INSITE) at UW–Madison. His work focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the role of the arts in community development. He leads the StartUp Learning Community and supports campus-wide innovation competitions that foster interdisciplinary problem-solving. He recently received the Gaumnitz Excellence in Instruction with AI Award for his efforts to make AI tools and services relevant and accessible to students. A graduate of Stanford and UW–Madison, John previously consulted with mission-driven organizations, federal agencies, and Fortune 500 companies. He is the past Chair of the Board at the Overture Center for the Arts.

Catalina Toma is Professor of Communication Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

My research examines how people understand and relate to one another when interacting via communication technologies (e.g., online dating, social network sites, mobile computing). I focus on the impact of communication technologies on relational processes such as: impression management and impression formation, deception and trust, self-worth, self-esteem and psychological well-being, interpersonal attraction, and relationship development. I am also interested in how language is produced and interpreted in computer-mediated contexts, especially as it relates to self-presenters’ deceptiveness and perceived trustworthiness. I am currently Associate Editor at Human Communication Research, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association, and at Computers in Human Behaviors. I am past Associate Editor at Journal of Media Psychology.

Sachin Tuli brings over 17 years of teaching experience to his courses in international business and global marketing, which include Business in the Global Economy and Global Marketing Strategy. Mr. Tuli has also taught many experiential learning based international business immersions to Argentina, China, Cuba, India, Mexico, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. In his current role as the Director of the International Business Program, Mr. Tuli advises students on academics and career paths, and fosters collaborations across campus and within the broader community.

An active contributor to various boards and committees, Mr. Tuli serves on the Institute for International and Regional Studies (IRIS) Advisory Board, Center for South Asia Steering Committee, University International Travel Committee (UITC), and as a Board Member and Program Committee Member of the Madison Committee on Foreign Relations (MCFR). Additionally, he is a member of the Madison International Trade Association (MITA) and the Academy of International Business. Mr. Tuli previously served as the Director of International Programs from 2007 to 2012, expanding study abroad and exchange offerings. During this time, he also provided guidance on the management of short-term international academic programs to faculty, staff, and students. Before this, he held the position of Assistant Director at the UW-Madison Center of International Business Education and Research (CIBER). Mr. Tuli has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Central America, and Asia. Holding a BBA in Marketing and an MS in Higher Education Administration, both earned at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mr. Tuli integrates his academic expertise with prior experience in business analysis and international trade promotion

David Williamson Shaffer is the Sears Bascom Professor of Learning Analytics and the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Data Philosopher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and before coming to the University of Wisconsin, he was a teacher, teacher-trainer, curriculum developer, and game designer. Professor Shaffer’s current work focuses on merging statistical and qualitative methods to construct fair models of complex and collaborative human activity. He has authored more than 250 publications with over 100 co-authors, including How Computer Games Help Children Learn and Quantitative Ethnography.