The steady drumbeat of news about advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology and its potential to unlock solutions and reshape the nature of work has made it clear that society is facing rapid transformation.
To help students prepare for the possibilities and challenges of this moment and the future, WPI has begun examining AI through its Great Problems Seminar, exposing first-year students to AI tools to explore how they work, to think critically about those tools’ potential benefits and risks to individuals and communities, and to consider ethical questions involving the emerging technology.
WPI’s Great Problems Seminar offers 11 courses, two-terms in length, to immerse first-year students in university-level research, introduce them to WPI’s project-based learning, and explore issues of global importance. This fall, the seminar launched two new AI courses.
“Through this new curriculum, we’re calling on students to ask, ‘Can we?’ and ‘Should we?’ when it comes to AI,” said Sarah Stanlick, director of the Great Problems Seminar and an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies. “We hear a lot about the potential of AI for good and sustainability. However, there are concerns about the hidden costs of running AI, such as data usage and resource depletion. I’m excited our students are exploring these complexities.”
Great Problems Seminar Courses Incorporating AI
One of the AI-focused Great Problems Seminar courses is AI, Design, and Society. In it, students are exploring what it means to be human in a digital world by studying the history of artificial intelligence, building and using AI systems, imagining a future with or without AI, and designing interactive experiences that explore the role of AI in our daily lives.
In the first term of the course, students made and programmed their own AI generators, which use artificial intelligence and prompts to create digital images or text.
“We’re getting a general sense in this course of how AI works,” said Alex Hardro ’28, a computer science and interactive media and game development double major. “I think one benefit is efficiency. AI can sort through so much information, and you can program it to look at problems in different ways to come up with solutions.”
Hardro said the class has made him think about the challenges associated with AI, including biases that reflect the human-generated information that feeds AI. He also said the class has given him the opportunity to critique AI generators. He said in many cases the images AI generators create are unrealistic and inaccurate. “When AI was asked to generate a face, the proportions were off,” he said. “It was not very good at accomplishing this task.”
In the course’s second term, which began in mid-January, students are working on group projects to design and explore the societal implications, positive and negative, of potential AI solutions in roughly a dozen areas including energy consumption, unequal access to food, disease detection, and language education.
“This might be the first time some of these new students are getting guidance on the appropriate use of AI in classroom and research settings,” said Gillian Smith, director of WPI’s Interactive Media and Game Development program and associate professor of computer science, who teaches the course with Stanlick. “I think this approach is helping students learn how to use AI tools and to understand that AI is not just an insular app. It has a broader ecosystem with environmental impacts.”
The other Great Problems Seminar course that integrated AI was Smart and Sustainable Cities, which concluded in December. In the class, students explored how artificial intelligence is incorporated into smart city tools such as sensors used for resource management and law enforcement. They explored how these tools reflect the history of race, class, and gender and were asked to consider their own values as society confronts technological disruptions.
“There’s a long history of thinking technology will solve all of society’s problems,” said Katherine Foo, assistant professor of teaching in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies, who co-taught the course with Stephen McCauley, associate professor of teaching in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies. “This course helps students develop their critical thinking about the economic, political, and social impacts of technology,” Foo said. “I think understanding these impacts will enable technologists to not only make technical innovations, but strategic social innovations as well.”
In this class, students worked in teams to explore the opportunities, risks, and challenges of implementing technological solutions to societal challenges including fossil fuel dependence, road safety, and urban heat islands.
“I’m curious about whether AI will be used to connect communities or if it’s just going to be used as a technical tool,” said Anna Towne ’28, a comp...
More from WPI Youtube Channel
- 0:35Welcome to the Herd, Class of 2029!Decisions are in and the journey begins! 📬 Welcome to the Herd, Class of 2029! 🐐🎉
- 6:21WPI 2024 Research Expenditures Reach Record High of $71.6 MillionWorcester Polytechnic Institute spent a record $71.6 million on research and development activities during the 2024 academic year, up 8% over the previous year, as expenditures grew on projects funded by federal agencies and nonprofit organizations. University researchers also launched 234 multiyear projects in 2024 and received a record $60 million in public and private awards for research activities. “WPI’s extraordinary faculty, staff, and students are conducting research that tackles some of the world’s most pressing problems, and the awards they have received from government, corporate, and private funders are a testament to their innovative thinking,” said Bogdan Vernescu, WPI vice president and vice provost for research and innovation. WPI’s research growth follows a decade of investment and work by students, faculty, and staff. The university was recently designated an R1 institution, the top tier of American research colleges and universities, based on its 2023 research spending and doctorate degrees. Newer data shows that WPI’s expansion of research and development continued in 2024. Information on research expenditures was recently submitted to the National Science Foundation, and WPI published award data in late 2024. About 83% of all research dollars awarded to WPI during 2024 were provided by the federal government. The Department of Defense sponsored more than $15 million in awards to WPI, followed by the NSF with nearly $14 million in awards, and the Department of Health and Human Services with more than $9 million in awards. Other large federal funders included the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, each with more than $2 million in awards to WPI researchers. State and local governments sponsored about 10% of the research funds awarded to WPI, and the remaining awards were sponsored by corporate, foundation, and other sponsors. Among those who received awards were a range of researchers across multiple disciplines. • Neil Heffernan, the William B. Smith Professor of Computer Science, received a $3.7 million award from the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to develop an AI math tutor to help students as they do their homework. • Sergey Makaroff, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded $3.7 million from the National Institute of Mental Health, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. He leads a multicenter project that is developing a new method for modeling brain activity. • Rodica Neamtu, professor of teaching in the Department of Computer Science, was awarded $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation to develop strategies and resources to boost the enrollment, retention, and graduation rates of low-income computer science undergraduates. • Vladimir Vantsevich, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, was awarded $2 million by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to support the development of a new laboratory for autonomous vehicle simulations. Successful research led to commercial activities, too. WPI inventors were awarded 21 patents during 2024, the university closed six technology licensing deals, and one new startup company focused on WPI technology was formed, WoundSys LLC. Founded by computer science Professor Emmanuel Agu, WoundSys is developing a smartphone-based technology that nurses could use to assess chronic wounds, incisions, and injuries while treating patients in their homes. In addition, several clean tech and climate tech companies with ties to WPI faculty and alumni were named to TIME magazine’s list of America’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2024. Among those named to the list and later honored by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey at a statehouse ceremony were Ascend Elements and AM Batteries, both co-founded by Yan Wang, the William B. Smith Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Ascend Elements focuses on lithium-ion battery recycling, and AM Batteries is pioneering cleaner battery manufacturing. To set the stage for additional grants in the years ahead, WPI awarded $360,000 in seed funding to more than a dozen research projects. The largest awards went to three photonics projects, each of which were awarded $70,000 from the Gapontsev Family Collaborative Venture Fund for research focused on lasers and laser applications. The President’s Research Catalyst Grants Program also awarded $50,000 each, from research-designated gift funds, to three faculty-led groups that will develop proposals for large research centers focused on making advances in bioengineering, new materials, and mental health. “Researchers across the university are using these seed grants to set the stage for larger, more expansive research in the future,” Vernescu said. “We expect these projects to result in bigger grants and an expanded research footprint involving faculty members across the campus.”
- 1:45Guess the WPI Professor: Part TwoWho's ready for round two of 'Guess the Professor'?
- 2:30WPI Develops Robotic System to Enhance Kidney Transplant ScreeningWorcester Polytechnic Institute researchers believe a new robotic technology they’re developing can help save lives by improving the process of matching kidney donors with people awaiting a transplant. Their approach seeks to advance medical evaluations that determine whether a donated kidney is viable to be transplanted.
- 6:32WPI Develops Innovative Robotic System to Enhance Kidney Transplant ScreeningWorcester Polytechnic Institute researchers believe a new robotic technology they’re developing can help save lives by improving the process of matching kidney donors with people awaiting a transplant. Their approach seeks to advance medical evaluations that determine whether a donated kidney is viable to be transplanted.According to the National Kidney Foundation, 90,000 people in the United States are on a kidney waitlist; each day, 12 die before a transplant can happen.While a shortage of donors is one reason for the long waitlist, another major factor is the number of donated kidneys that get discarded. Assessing a kidney for transplant involves examining the organ after it’s been removed from the donor to ensure the kidney is free of disease or structural anomalies.Current methods for this assessment include either a biopsy, which involves a review of cells taken from a small sample of the kidney, or optical coherence tomography (OCT), a light-based handheld imaging technology that can provide a high-resolution snapshot of a limited section of the organ.The assessment process risks wasting the organ because these exams take time and provide information about only a small portion of the kidney; both factors may hamper clinicians’ ability to accurately assess the organ and approve it for transplant while it is still viable.Haichong (Kai) Zhang, associate professor of robotics engineering and biomedical engineering, and Xihan Ma, a robotics engineering PhD student, are using innovations in medical robotics to address this problem.“With our robotic system, we can capture a scan of the whole kidney,” said Zhang. “With current approaches, the area of the kidney that can be assessed is inherently limited by either the size of the biopsy needle or the size of the OCT imaging probe, and thus the assessment of the organ is biased by which small part of the kidney the operator chooses to focus on.”Zhang and Ma have developed a robotic OCT system, which is a fully automated method of imaging an entire donated kidney to help a clinician make an assessment. The system was developed at WPI’s Medical FUSION (Frontier Ultrasound Imaging and Robotic Instrumentation) Lab.“Our motivation is to think about how we can streamline the process used to evaluate the viability of donated kidneys to be more reliable and accurate, and to not waste kidneys that potentially can be used to save lives of patients,” said Zhang. “We are integrating the strengths of medical robots to make imaging of donor kidneys more accessible and less user-dependent and to acquire images over a wider area of the organ, which can provide more concise and direct feedback to clinicians so they can make better clinical decisions.”The method Zhang’s team developed consists of a robotic arm and a software system programmed to position an optical coherence tomography camera above a donated kidney in a sample tray at the height that will ensure maximum image quality. Zhang said the innovation improves upon handheld OCT technology, which requires a person to manually hold the imaging device at the proper height and take photos one at a time, a process that can be difficult and time-consuming. Through the robotic system, the imaging device can automatically and precisely adjust its position to sweep above the entire kidney, without touching it, and stitch together a full image of the organ, without missing any portions of it.The robotic system analyzes information from a separate 3D camera mounted to the arm to plot out a path, like how a GPS unit devises a route, to ensure a full scan. “This real-time information from the images will guide the robot to apply a more optimized scanning trajectory and optimize the image quality,” said Ma, who added that the images from the scan appear immediately on a monitor for a clinician’s assessment of the transplant viability. “Ultimately, this system will provide the clinical staff with valuable information about the kidney’s health status.”Zhang and Ma are part of a cross-institution research team working on this project. The team includes experts in optics and biomedical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Oklahoma, as well as clinical experts in biology and biochemistry at Georgetown University. The research is funded by a $2,527,424 award, shared among the organizations, from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.In September 2024, the research team published findings of its testing on the robotic optical coherence tomography system in the journal Communications Engineering. The testing, conducted at PracticePoint, WPI’s state-of-the-art medical technology and biotechnology research and development testing facility, used 3D-printed objects to mimic the structure of kidneys as well as a donated human kidney that had been declined for transplantation. The tests demonstra...
- 1:13Guess the WPI Professor: Can You Identify Them? – Part OneGuess the WPI Professor: Can You Identify Them? – Part One
