The Spring 2025 CCAIS Lab Research Fellows Pilot Program
AI Theatre, D. Pillis (Assistant Professor, Visual & Media Arts Department, Emerson College)
Recent advances in artificial intelligence through the development of widely available large language models have enabled highly realistic real-time interactions with virtual characters. In a recent research project, titled AI Theatre, we are exploring the potential of multi-agent interactions with users in a conversational user interface, designed to study how interactions with virtual characters can enhance a user’s real life interactions. The AI Theatre simulation is a pedagogical tool merging AI and theater to facilitate practice of interpersonal conflict resolution. Drawing inspiration from Augusto Boal’s concept of theater as a catalyst for societal change, AI Theatre employs virtual agents and large language models to simulate lifelike conflict scenarios. Users engage with these agents, experimenting with various conflict resolution strategies within a secure and safe simulation environment. Results from a study involving 240 participants indicated that AI Theatre significantly enhanced confidence and self-efficacy in devising conflict solutions, showcasing its efficacy in teaching conflict management skills across social and professional contexts. Developing this project with students and faculty peers at Emerson will enable greater insight at the intersection of AI, theatre, and human-AI collaboration.
AI & Data Democratization, Lina Giraldo (Assistant Professor, Journalism Department, Emerson College)
As I explore data democratization from the perspective of marginalized communities, the urgent need for thoughtful data collection, exploration, and storytelling becomes increasingly clear. AI has become an essential tool for incorporating societal input, particularly for communities historically misrepresented or subjected to bias in data processes. Data misclassification, inadequate research, and the exclusion of input from the communities most affected have left these groups vulnerable to being erased from the narrative and lacking opportunities when impacted by environmental racism. By incorporating environmental justice perspectives through community-driven sensor-making, marginalized groups can actively participate in creating data, ensuring that their lived experiences are accurately represented. It is essential to critically examine the biases inherent in AI systems and explore the creative potential for reimagining these tools. Through collaborative and artistic approaches—such as participatory design workshops and storytelling with sensor-generated data—we can challenge traditional frameworks and inspire innovative ways to amplify marginalized voices. To create genuinely inclusive AI, the democratization of the process—rooted in participatory practices like sensor-making and supported by creative, community-centered input—is not just important; it is essential.
Logistics Against Democracy, Russell Newman (Associate Professor, Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College)
As part of a broader project called “Logistics Against Democracy,” I’m working to offer fresh theorizations of emergent political economies of what I am terming ‘data logistics’ alongside their historical and epistemological foundations, joining others who are paying close heed to transformations in broader processes of economic and communicative circulation to which AI is contributing. The logics undergirding generative AI intersect with and simultaneously diverge from the logics that have driven our communications systems to date, such as the reliance on behavioral marketing and advertising and their attendant data-collection practices. The drive to provide AI ‘assistants’ across numerous sectors raises new challenges for democratic governance alongside new commercial and state logics and incentives. Our world is being transformed to accommodate these new drives, but many policy tools available to us to resist are insufficient to handle these new logics. This project seeks to offer new directions and frameworks for both policy and activism.
Artificial Abundance, Roopa Vasudevan (Assistant Professor, Department of Art, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Artificial Abundance is a body of artistic work exploring artificial intelligence and the requisite assumptions of limitlessness and greed that it carries along with it—which stand in direct contrast to the limited human resources available to support it. The project consists of interrelated, mixed media artworks, publications, and programs spanning four sub-themes and their relationships with machine intelligence: Mortality, Nature, Faith, and Labor. The artworks all use or engage everyday digital systems or instantiations of AI, emphasizing the ways these analogies already shape our understandings of technology. Through these explorations, I ask what it means when we attempt to assign humanity, and distinctly human sensemaking capabilities, to machines—and what we are implying about the larger messiness, disorder, and finiteness of humanity when we use these metaphors to describe computational processes.
Automating Pedagogy with AI Agents for Creative Text-to-Image AI Education, Yuguang Zhang (adjunct faculty, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University)
Automating Pedagogy with AI Agents for Creative Text-to-Image AI Education explores the potential of AI agents to serve as interactive educators for a self-guided course on text-to-image AIs. It investigates how AI systems can simulate the role of an instructor by offering students real-time feedback, adaptive learning experiences, and interactive lessons on topics such as prompting practices, model customization, and workflow design. Combining creative experimentation with pedagogical theory, this project critically examines the possibilities and challenges of using AI to democratize access to specialized knowledge, fostering autonomous learning while addressing ethical considerations of AI-driven education.