James Dobson, associate professor of English and creative writing and director of the Writing Program, has been appointed special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence for the 2024-25 academic year.
“AI technology has tremendous potential to change the way we teach, learn, create, and innovate. It is critical for Dartmouth to think deeply about how we can encourage and support faculty in the use of AI to support their scholarship and our educational mission,” says Provost David Kotz ’86, the Pat and John Rosenwald Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Dobson, a digital humanities expert, has studied the history of machine learning and artificial intelligence, thinking critically about the technology’s evolution and its limitations. In his role leading the Writing Program, he has also done substantial work around AI and pedagogy.
“It’s almost impossible to talk about Dartmouth and AI without mentioning the 1956 summer conference where the term was coined,” says Dobson, who is keen to honor that legacy while considering how Dartmouth fits into the AI landscape now and working toward building a vision for the future.
Over the course of the year, Dobson will take a high-level overview of everything related to the academic use of AI at Dartmouth and create a roadmap for expanding engagement with AI technology in support of its research and curricular goals.
“Part of my work will be a growth of ongoing conversations about where and how generative AI fits into teaching and learning at Dartmouth, but now extending some of those conversations into research as well,” says Dobson.
Generative AI models—such as ChatGPT and DALL·E—can create text, image, audio, and video content.
Dobson will also take stock of the infrastructure available to support people across Dartmouth who want to use the latest AI tools and what may be needed in terms of human and computational resources to enable more users to adopt the technology in their work in future.
Other universities and research institutions are currently undertaking similar endeavors, and Dobson will investigate possible regional and national partnerships and relations with other academic institutions to pool resources, particularly around technology-related costs.
Dobson, who goes by Jed, completed his bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and went on to earn a master’s of arts at the University of Chicago and a PhD in English from Indiana University.
Dobson is the author of several books and essays on computational methods including machine learning, computer vision, and data mining.
In Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology, Dobson explores the opportunities and challenges that humanities researchers encounter as they adopt sophisticated data science tools. His latest book, The Birth of Computer Vision, traces the stories of scientists who taught computers how to see and the development of a series of important algorithms that shaped the fields of computer vision and machine learning. He has also co-authored a forthcoming book, Perceptron, on the first widely popular machine learning algorithm.
“Jed understands and uses technology like large language models and writes critically about their potential and their impact on society,” says Kotz. “As a humanist and as director of our Writing Program, he understands how these technologies impact the humanities and play a role in our teaching and learning.”
AI and information literacy must be folded into the curriculum as soon as possible, says Dobson. “When you search on Google now, you get an AI overview. It’s already right in front of us, changing how we get access to knowledge and information,” he says. In keeping pace with the technology, it is important to think and learn about what AI tools are good for, where they should be used, where they shouldn’t, and how to interpret their outputs.
Dobson, who will teach a class in the fall examining AI from a humanities perspective with a focus on its histories and its effects, sees it as an opportunity to combine his work in the new position with his teaching and scholarship.
He is excited about connecting with people from across Dartmouth and working with stakeholders across campus to develop an identity for Dartmouth and AI.
“I’m hoping to bring people from the humanities and social sciences into the conversation and build connections with those in science, engineering, and medicine,” he says.