Tags: AI@Franklin

Mike Zahorec and Nick Schuster

Is AI Changing what critical thinking requires?

UGA philosophers examine how people can preserve judgment, agency, and responsibility as AI increasingly shapes everyday decisions.  This story is part of Humanities in Practice, a Franklin College of Arts and Sciences series exploring the value of the humanities in work and everyday life.  Michael Zahorec and Nick Schuster, faculty members in UGA’s Department of Philosophy, study how AI affects human judgment. Together, they are…
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How a Franklin researcher is combining AI and genetics to improve agriculture

Humans have participated in selective breeding for millennia to cultivate more resilient crops one generation at a time. Now, one UGA postdoctoral researcher is studying how machine learning can make the process exponentially more efficient.   Hongwoo Lee, a postdoctoral researcher at Franklin College of Arts and Science's Department of Genetics, researches how to use machine learning to guide DNA sequence manipulation for specific…
Jane Odum on stage receiving award

Franklin Ph.D. student’s summer pivot wins $100,000 prize for AI startup MyFixam

Jane Odum developed MyFixam through the inaugural Franklin CREATE! Summer Startup Academy  Three months after Jane Odum earned just $9 from the first product she tried to sell, the University of Georgia computer science Ph.D. candidate stood on a Los Angeles stage to accept a $100,000 prize.  Odum won third prize in the Google XPRIZE Build with Gemini Competition for MyFixam, a marketplace where people in Nigeria can find verified…
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AI agents have a memory problem. Franklin researchers are working to fix it.

Researchers in Franklin College of Arts and Science have built a new memory architecture for AI agents that improves response accuracy on complex tasks up to 23 percent.   The system, called Synapse (Synergistic Associative Processing and Semantic Encoding), addresses the current struggle for large-language models and agents to recall past conversations. This “contextual isolation” often results in weak and conflicting responses.…
man in blue shirt with lighted robot on desk in front of him.

Why ChatGPT still can't hold a conversation

ChatGPT can write essays, explain calculus, and generate computer code in a fraction of the time it takes a human. What it can't replicate is the kind of casual conversation shared between friends on a front porch.  For Ryan Ka Yau Lai, assistant professor in the University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Linguistics, the reason is straightforward.  "At their core, AI models are trained to produce…
Alex Asay in military uniform standing on road in desert

New book links philosophy of play to AI questions

When AI changes the rules  Long before ChatGPT, philosopher Bernard Suits posed a question that has become increasingly relevant in the age of artificial intelligence: What makes a life meaningful when work and effort are no longer necessities?  For Alex Asay, the rise of AI has not changed that question—it has made it impossible to ignore.  A doctoral student in the University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and…
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